Gini School of Economics – Gini Foundation

Economics in the real world is very different from the Economics taught in many colleges today. In fact, as we have written in our Gini books, the Economics curricula taught in many schools is usually based on dozens of false assumptions, unrealistic models, and distorted and out-of-context interpretations of classical economic principles. This is causing destructive social, geopolitical, and economic problems throughout the world. All this confusion gives politicians and corporations an excuse to keep cramming bad economic, regulatory, and global trade policies down humanity's collective throat and exploiting the inevitable socioeconomic crises that they create.

Additionally, modern crypto-economics and artificial intelligence are rapidly changing the way humans interact within regional and global economies. With all these complex dynamics swirling around us at an ever-faster pace, the Gini team realized that it's probably difficult for most humans on Earth to make sense of it all; and there's no place to go for a substantive, real-world Economics education that covers all the principles that we believe are important at this challenging point in human history.

Maximizing Profit is Not Equal to Maximizing Human Welfare. A huge false assumption that virtually all mainstream economists have made since the late 1970s is that GDP is all that really matters. They claim that as long as a country’s GDP is growing, then all the wealth will magically trickle down to the masses and there will be more winners than losers. Similarly, many people in the crypto community still believe that all the whale wealth will trickle down to the crypto masses when the whales start selling their cryptocurrency. There is no evidence that trickle-down economics works to achieve economic stability and equitable wealth distribution in the fiat or crypto worlds. Thus, there is no evidence that there will ever be any meaningful decentralization of wealth and power throughout any economy (fiat or crypto) based on the monetary policies used in fiat and crypto economies today. In fact, the evidence shows the exact opposite outcomes.

Stagnant Middle-Class Incomes Prove Trickle-Down Economics Doesn’t Work. Aggregate economic metrics like GDP (or crypto market cap) reveal nothing about how wealth and power is distributed throughout a population; and the distribution of wealth and power in every population is what determines the systemic health of every economy, including a crypto economy. This is why measuring the Gini Index and median income (not per-capita income) is so important. Measuring those factors, we can see that high Gini Indexes and the completely flat and declining real income of the middle classes in nearly all rich countries today (while their GDP’s have exploded) proves that trickle-down economics is a fantasy. Yet, all mainstream fiat and crypto economic theories, models, and cryptocurrency projects are built on this fantasy today. Predictably, these are the same theories, models, and fantasies that have transformed our global economy into the debt-choked, unstable, unsustainable, oligarchic system of corporate greed and economic injustice that it is today.

A Fusion of Humanist Philosophy, Modern Technology, and Sustainable, Nonpartisan Public Policy. As we build the Gini ecosystem based on a sustainable and equitable monetary policy, the architecture of our technological systems is a reflection of our economic and humanitarian philosophy. However, without a structured educational environment to make it easy for people to learn and understand why our systems and project governance policies are superior to those that exist in any fiat or crypto ecosystem today, it would be difficult for people to appreciate why Gini is special and why it's so critical to the future of human civilization. (Seriously?)

Introduction to the Gini School of Economics. For all the reasons above, we are building a free online Gini School of Economics (GSE) to expand the economic awareness and nurture the intellectual growth of stakeholders throughout the Gini ecosystem. Economics can be fun and exciting and we are building the GSE to be as engaging as possible. Most importantly, the unique GSE curriculum, like our books and articles, is based on real-world socioeconomic data and sustainable economic principles, which correspond with the technical architecture of the Gini cryptocurrency and blockchain.

The GSE Curriculum. The GSE curriculum is comprised of the following four modules.

Market Fundamentals: 18th Century Adam Smith. This includes a succinct analysis of Adam Smith's most famous writings—The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments—to debunk the Wall Street distortions that have taken his work completely out of context over the past 150 years or so. This will give GSE students the core foundations of market-based economic principles. Note: The common modern perception of Adam Smith is severely distorted by pop-business culture today. In reality, Adam Smith was a very thoughtful, compassionate and spiritual man who was nothing like the "capitalist pig" that many people assume he was. This misconception is usually based on the way his "Invisible Hand" concept is often conflated with the "greed is good" meme in popular business culture. In fact, Adam Smith's actual words about capitalism, free markets, charity, taxation, corporate corruption, government intervention, and many other aspects of his writings are summarized in the Gini book to debunk all the most egregious distortions.
Market Sustainability: 19th Century Henry George. Among serious economists, Henry George is almost universally admired for his deep insights about equitable taxation and sustainable Economics. In fact, Henry George has influenced Gini's economic philosophy more than any other economist. His book, Progress & Poverty, sold more copies than any book in human history (except the Bible) prior to his death in 1897; yet, many people have never heard of Henry George. Why? Because there has been an actual systematic conspiracy to silence him and bury his ideas, which is perpetrated primarily by large banks, large corporations, and large landowners who perceive his irrefutable logic and real-world analysis as a serious threat to their economic and political dominance. A whole chapter in the Gini book is devoted to explaining and expanding upon many principles that Henry George presented in his book, but the Gini book is written in modern and easy-to-understand language.
Modern Data-Driven Analysis & Developmental Economics: 20th Century Joseph Stiglitz. Joseph Stiglitz's Nobel Prize-winning work in data-driven Information Economics and his analysis of real-world socioeconomic outcomes has thoroughly debunked the ideologically-driven propaganda that neoliberal economists and globalism cheerleaders have been cramming down humanity's collective throat for the past 40 years. Stiglitz is a hero in the developing world because he is one of the few internationally renown economists who has the courage to confront Transnational Cannibals and so-called "orthodox economists" (aka, "mainstream economists"). Those mainstream economists have given Wall Street and their cronies in government a veneer of academic respectability and an ideological excuse to rape our planet's natural resources and destroy the human rights of workers in many countries since the 1980s. GSE students should find Stiglitz's no-nonsense, real-world, data-driven insights to be quite refreshing.
Cryptocurrencies & Human-Centered Economics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: 21st Century Ferris Eanfar, et al. Let's be clear: Artificial intelligence changes everything. With A.I.-powered genetic and cybernetic engineering, the IoT, and superhuman robotics, virtually nothing in human civilization will be the same 20 years from now. Gigantic corporations would like us to believe that A.I. is just another productivity tool that we should purchase from them, like Brains-as-a-Service (BaaS). They point to bogus employment statistics, trumpet the libertarian virtues of free markets, and pretend A.I. will create more human jobs than it destroys; so, humans have nothing to fear. What they don't tell you is:
- A.I. is unquestionably the most powerful tool ever created for gigantic banks and corporations to extract every last bit of wealth and power from humanity. (Why "gigantic corporations"?)
- A.I. guarantees that the global distribution of wealth and political power will be even more concentrated in the coming years if the structural economic and political distortions that cause Broken Capitalism are not fixed.
- Puritanical Economic Libertarianism is a Trojan Horse, which is often embraced by the corporate elite, their political cronies in government, and virtually all other cryptocurrency teams today. Tech-focused crypto teams often don't have enough real-world business and geopolitical experience and historical Economics education beyond a few ideologically saturated books to truly understand how their passion for liberty has been hijacked by gigantic corporations.²
- Puritanical Economic Libertarianism creates the perfect ideological marriage between independent-minded, high-skilled technologists and the "shareholder is king" corporate elite. This enables gigantic corporations to attract the skills to build their cannibalistic empires and the ideological justification to exploit the embedded, unearned systemic privileges that politicians dole out to the largest Transnational Cannibals in exchange for their political campaign financing and other quid-pro-quo exchanges. (Yes, this is real-world Economics, which students would never learn in a traditional university.)
- Puritanical Economic Libertarianism is an inadequate and self-destructive economic philosophy in a world where the collusion between gigantic corporations and governments and the A.I. they control will dominate all so-called "free markets" and all areas of human economic existence. This makes a mockery of all the concepts that Libertarians cherish: "free markets," "Laissez-Faire," "freedom," "liberty," "self-sovereignty". . . . They often don't realize that shouting "Government, leave me alone!" and "Read Hayek, Mises, Rothbard, Bastiat!" like a broken record does absolutely nothing to change the geopolitical, technological, and socioeconomic dynamics that are destroying their own economic and political freedom in the real-world.
- Nearly all the major cryptocurrencies today are poorly designed from a transaction privacy perspective. (This is why transaction privacy is one of Gini's primary technical architecture principles.) This means they can be easily controlled by governments and corporations with emerging government cryptocurrency blacklists. This is already transforming those cryptocurrencies into literally trillions of digital spies that can be used by gigantic corporations and governments to track every private transaction in real-time. Combined with incomprehensibly powerful corporate- and government-controlled A.I., this spells "game over" for human liberty and human rights.
- By the time the general public really grasps what is happening, it will be too late because the corporate- and government-controlled A.I. will be too fast and too powerful to resist. The economic and social consequences of A.I. and poorly designed cryptocurrencies will be catastrophic unless humanity is empowered with the knowledge and tools that are necessary to truly protect their economic and political freedom.

Gini's Economic Philosophy

The four modules above will give GSE students a well-rounded Economics education and a deeper awareness of the following 10 pillars of Gini's unique and practical economic philosophy.¹^,²

The forces of supply and demand should always be respected, but they are not gods that rule the universe. Other factors can and should be considered in every real-world economic policy analysis to preserve the integrity of human and ecological ecosystems.
Sustainable and equitable economic systems are essential to creating sustainable and equitable political systems.
Pure free markets are a fantasy. Governments will always intervene in economies to some degree because politicians always have incentives and geopolitical pressures to do so. Thus, the most important real-world economic question societies should ask and answer is: Will governments intervene to amplify the economies of scale of the whales (i.e., transnational cannibals in the fiat world and crypto whales in the cryptocurrency world) or will governments intervene to create ecosystem balance so that small- to medium-sized companies and the middle class can achieve a sustainable level of wealth and political influence within their ecosystems?
There is a distinction between empirical, data-driven analysis vs. ideological fear-mongering, unsubstantiated label-slinging, and thoughtless social bullying. The Gini team will not engage in time-wasting ideological debates, especially if the debates are not based on credible data and focused on real-world socioeconomic outcomes. If somebody doesn't like what we're doing, they can simply ignore us.
Governments and cyrptocurrency projects should rationally adjust their economic policies and systems based on real-world human welfare outcomes, not based on blind ideological dogma, model-driven propaganda, short-sighted political tribalism, and self-serving financial agendas.
Gigantic corporations and government bureaucracies will always distort all forms of wealth and political power distribution in every economy and society. ("Wealth" can be financial, natural resources, land, capital, labor, human capital, etc.) Thus, every society should implement systemic mechanisms to automatically and proactively minimize the size of corporations and governments based on specific metrics that have been approved by a democratic majority of a society's citizens.⁴
A corporation is not evil in itself. Corporations are simply wealth-generating engines that should be used as vehicles for broad wealth creation and distribution. Corporations become evil when politicians and tiny groups of corporate shareholders conspire against the general public to concentrate a society's wealth and political power into their own hands. (Even Adam Smith said this, which you can read about in the Gini book.)
The consequences of gigantic corporations and governments monopolizing A.I. will be profoundly destructive to human economic freedom and political liberty. Gini was born to help minimize these consequences.
Only a well-designed cryptocurrency can give humanity a chance to escape A.I.-powered corporate and government tyranny. (Definition of "well-designed cryptocurrency.")
Human economies exist to serve the needs of actual humans, not A.I. bots, professional market manipulators, hedge fund speculators, or faceless corporations that primarily benefit a tiny number of shareholders. Thus, the algorithms that power all of Gini's technologically mediated markets and systems will always be optimized to maximize the distribution of Gini wealth to the largest number of humans. Economically, this conscious technical differentiation is justified based on the principle that value creation and symbiotic purchasing power within an economy are always maximized when value and purchasing power are flowing to the maximum number of human market participants.

Technical Architectural Design Flows from Philosophical Beliefs. This is hard for many technical people to accept because they believe it's possible to cleanly separate philosophy/ideology from economics and technical engineering. We wish the universe was this simple, but it's not. In fact, broken incentives and ideological blindness are precisely what makes it impossible for virtually all other cryptocurrency teams today to fix any of the major problems in the cryptocurrency markets. (These problems and Gini's solution are explained on the Gini Decentralized Cryptocurrency Exchange page.)

No matter how much technical talent they might have, and no matter how many interesting side-chains, payment channels, and never-ending network augmentations they might cobble together, they will never fix these problems. Why? Because their ideologies and philosophical belief systems about how economies and markets should work will never allow them to do what is necessary to acknowledge and fix the fundamental source of these problems. Thus, they will continue believing in the fantasy that pure free markets can exist, which will predictably doom their markets and ecosystems to perpetual dysfunction, hyper-volatility, unsustainable and inequitable socioeconomic outcomes, and systemic corruption. That's why their cryptocurrencies will never be viable for large-scale, real-world commerce.

A Note to Our Libertarian Friends. We understand that puritanical Libertarians will be ideologically resistant to some of the principles that guide the Gini Foundation and the Gini cryptocurrency technical development. So, you should know this: Virtually everybody on the Gini team was a Libertarian for most of their adult lives until we started doing the research and development for our books and the Gini technical infrastructure. Now . . .

after years of studying the actual real-world socioeconomic outcomes of the neoliberal and libertarian-inspired economic and global trade policies that have dominated planet Earth over the past 40 years;
after thinking deeply about how the toxic collusion between gigantic corporations and governments has historically and repeatedly resulted in large-scale economic oppression, political tyranny, and geopolitical conflict (See the Gini Book List if you don't believe this.);
after recognizing that pure free markets are a fantasy and governments will always intervene in economies to some degree, which makes a mockery of Keynes and Hayek; so, the most important real-world economic question is: Will governments intervene on behalf of a tiny number of shareholders of gigantic banks and corporations or will they intervene on behalf of the general population?
and after thinking deeply about how A.I. will inevitably be used by gigantic corporations and self-serving politicians as a weapon of mass economic destruction and wealth extraction against large human populations;

. . . we rationally no longer believe Libertarianism is an adequate philosophy to resolve the real-world challenges that threaten human civilization in the 21st Century and beyond. That's why Gini was born.

Preview of Coming Attractions. Below is an early prototype of the online Gini School of Economics homepage. Many more books and resources will be added from other academically rigorous authors and professors who appreciate the Gini economic philosophy and technical design principles. Our books, GINI: Capitalism, Cryptocurrencies & The Battle for Human Rights and Broken Capitalism: This Is How We Fix It provide a glimpse of the principles that will be taught in the Gini School. (This is just the beginning; so, we don't expect anybody to be impressed with this prototype at this early stage. Give us time.)

"Why Isn't (Insert Random Economist) Included in the GSE Curriculum?" We appreciate the substantial contributions from other great economists like David Ricardo, Friedrich Hayek, John M. Keynes, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, Murray Rothbard, Frederic Bastiat, Milton Friedman, and many others, but they are all either too ideologically-driven (leading to amusing but never-ending, irrational ideological fights) or their work is focused on aspects of the economy that are too technical to expect the general public to appreciate.

In contrast, the GSE is intended to provide students with a solid, nonpartisan foundation in free-market fundamentals; sustainable economic policy; basic, real-world data analysis techniques; and an overview of the rapidly evolving world of cryptocurrencies and A.I. as they relate to economics and human rights in the 21st Century. We believe the GSE's unique and engaging curriculum is the optimal way to empower humans of all ages in all countries with the economic knowledge and tools they need to hold their political and business leaders accountable for their actions.

The online Gini School of Economics is an exciting project. We already have a large and growing database of unique economics articles that will be integrated into the GSE curriculum. We will update this page as we achieve each new GSE milestone. Please follow Gini on Twitter and/or join the Gini Newsletter if you want to be alerted when we reach important milestones.

Notes:

1. We considered including many other principles in Gini's economic philosophy, but we can only really have an impact in the areas of Economics and technology in which our team has significant real-world knowledge and experience. For example, we recognize that environmental sustainability and climate issues are important to consider in any economic philosophy, but we are not environmental or climate scientists and those domains are too far outside of Gini's core economic and cryptocurrency activities. However, we believe that students who graduate from the GSE will be much more consciously aware and sensitive to all economic and environmental sustainability issues, which will create the conditions for more responsible stewardship of all ecosystems, including our planet's ecological ecosystems.

2. We would have preferred fewer philosophical pillars. However, we believe these 10 pillars are the minimum number of pillars that GSE students should understand for them to have any chance of preventing the catastrophic consequences associated with the collusion of gigantic corporations and governments, lightning-fast A.I., and badly designed cryptocurrencies.

3. This is one of the most significant factors that differentiates the Gini team from other tech teams. Specifically, our founding team has much more real-world business experience building and delivering mission-critical payment processing technologies; real-world (and academic) Economics training; real-world geopolitical knowledge, experience and awareness; and real-world experience building a nonprofit service ecosystem. Thus, our incentives, experience and goals are optimally integrated and aligned with the public interest to execute Gini's important mission with thoughtful diligence and integrity.

4. Read the Gini book and Broken Capitalism for specific, market-based mechanisms to accomplish this without sliding into central planning and communism.