Randy Charles Epping - The new world economy : a beginners guide : demystifying everything from ai and bitcoins to unicorns and Generation Z

What is the world coming to? Populist governments around the world are ripping up trade agreements, building walls, and throwing economic cooperation out the windowall in the name of protecting jobs and ensuring long-term economic growth. It all sounds good; its supposed to. Who needs foreigners? Who needs the rest of the world to be rich and secure?

The only problem is that much of whats being doneostensibly for economic reasonsis actually being done to further the political agendas of exploitive politicians and ends up hurting the very people they say they want to help. The working class in many of the worlds developed countries has seen real wages stagnate over the last thirty years while those in the top 1 percent have seen their income levels and wealth increase astronomically. Meanwhile, populist politicians are enacting large tax cuts, theoretically to stimulate economic growth and job creation, often creating gargantuan fiscal deficits. Not surprisingly, many corporations are choosing to use their windfall profits to buy back shares instead of hiring more workersmainly benefiting wealthy shareholders. In the end, trade wars usually help a small minority of companies who long for protected marketsand they usually hurt everyone else, including the very workers those trade barriers are supposed to protect.

But what can we do? Many of us are bewildered by a fast-changing global economy that seems too big and too complicated for us to understand. So we let the politicians make our decisions for us. Unfortunately, the politicians are not always going to do whats best for us. Theyre going to do whats best for them and their reelection chances.

Cryptocurrenciesimmigrationsharp powertrade warsand robots taking our jobs away. A virtual explosion of complexity has occurred within the economy over the last few years, and we are being asked to understand it all. Words and phrases like pollution rights, algorithm-based artificial intelligence, and hot money appear regularly in the news, and many of us dont know what they actually mean. Furthermore, the incessant stream of fearmongering sound bites on the news and on the Internet only leaves us confused and anxious.

But it is, in fact, possible for us to demystify virtually all of it. Essentially, the world economy is no more complicated than the domestic economy that we navigate daily. We dont think twice about using the Internet or crossing the street to get a better deal when buying an appliance. Its not so different from crossing borders to invest our money or to buy and sell goods and services. Sound economic judgment is one of the most-needed skills in the world today. And since most of what were getting from politicians is manipulative rhetoric that plays to our fears and heightens division, were going to have to look out for our own economic interests. The idea of this book is not only to give you a basic understanding of what is happening in the world economy but also to provide you with the tools to be able to make sense of future economic eventsgood or bad.

Whoever we arecollege students or businesspeople, environmentalists or farmers, homemakers or union activistsif were going to be responsible citizens and consumers, were going to have to learn the basics of the economy we live in. For many of us, however, the study of economics has been an exercise in futility, full of obscure graphs and equations that feel hopelessly out of touch with our daily lives.