One Day Everyone will Live in Manhattan.

Feedback loops typically take a bit of the output signal and feed it back into the input. They have their uses so long as they’re under control. In a broader context you could say Darwin’s theories of evolution are based on feedback loops and even the old adage, ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’ As wealth accumulates power the wealthy use it to skew the system to their advantage. It’s a feedback loop we’re all aware of, but like the microphone howl at a concert it can destroy the performance not to mention the sound system itself. So the question arises, when does the wealth/power feedback loop go critical and begin to destroy our whole economic system? Recently Facebook lost $120 billion in one day’s trading. That’s 3.5 million years of average UK pay. We are nearing that point. A man, they’re usually men, with a yearly income of say £15 million might spend, i.e. put back into the economy, £1 million. The rest he must spend in the completely separate economy of world finance. With the top 1% owning say 80% of wealth it’s likely 60% to 70% is being siphoned off real economies into global finance. That leaves our working economy surviving on half of what it generates. This constitutes a ‘negative’ feedback loop where the output is used to suppress the input. It’s like giving a horse 50% of the food it needs to do the work required of it. It won’t immediately starve to death but year on year it will become weaker and weaker until it finally collapses. This is where we’re at. Venezuela is a basket case only because world finance won’t go there and there are other countries on the brink. It’s a kind of economic climate change where life-giving rain is being directed only to the safest places for a return. With no money for basic services, health, education, policing etc and no sign of the horse getting more food anytime soon Venezuela is dieing. Unimaginable amounts of currency are blowing around the globe boosting stock markets under the direction of one seemingly rational, almost laudable imperative, a return on investment. And in their wake economic wastelands. But people don’t die they walk. Immigrants are forming human winds of their own under this economic jet stream moving to wherever it rains. There are two human wills in contradiction, the will to live and the will to become even more wealthy. The latter would do well to recognise, and quickly, which will is the stronger.