| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
A World Ruined And Ruled By The Tyrant Of Price
By Wilfred Hahn ((Eternal Value Review)
Does anyone doubt the endtime role of money?
We quote this long-urgent observation: “We live in a dangerous world where prices abound without values; and costs are only measured in prices. In such a world the price becomes the value and values are separated from real costs. What that means is that the common denominator of what is right becomes the price. A world ruled by price? That’s what happens in a world that is quickly globalizing and financializing. Price then becomes the world’s judiciary. It alone determines what is right and good.”
To gain insight into how this tyrannical state of affairs has come about, it is first necessary to examine the role of numbers and numeracy. These provide an on-ramp to this tyrannical new world.
[Editor’s Note: This article is a slightly-modified version of Chapter 8 of the 2002 book, Endtime Money Snare: How to live free. It is even more relevant a decade later.]
Let’s begin our investigation. What follows might seem like a jumbled assortment of trivia, yet they are all connected in an important way. Can you identify the commonality?
- The Canadian government estimates the average cost of every suicide in the Province of New Brunswick at $849,877.80. An official stated that the study was done to show the importance of measures to prevent suicide, and that economic studies are the way to raise awareness of health problems.
- Having a successful marriage is enormously important to happiness — it is worth the equivalent of $100,000 a year in income calculates Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University.
- Tuesday, February 29, is expected to have added about $25.3 billion to the US gross domestic product in the year 2000.
- A study by the Australian government estimates that if 50 percent of all trade barriers for agriculture, services and manufacturing would be removed, it would boost the world economy by more than $400 billion by 2015.
- Thomas Hopkins of the Rochester Institute of Technology puts the cost of complying with federal rules at $668 billion in 1995. Employing his conservative estimates, he suggests that federal regulation costs the average American household $7,000; more than the average tax bill of $6,000.
You will probably have guessed the commonality of the above-mentioned facts. This collection of anecdotes isn’t any different from what might ordinarily be found in a daily newspaper; however, that is not their connection. What is common to all of them is that they are all related to money. Every one of these trends or conditions, no matter how abstract or unquantifiable, has been expressed as a value in terms of a currency.
Your first reaction, like mine, may be this: Just how were these estimates made? What techniques could possibly have been used to convert all these unrelated phenomena to a common language of money? Some of these facts do not seem particularly suited to being expressed as a monetary value. This practice of relating facts to monetary value can be crude and inappropriate. After all, can human life be valued in terms of money? What is the value of a liver transplant? What is the real, monetary value of truth? These are difficult questions and the answers are unquantifiable. Yet, estimates like these are printed daily about almost anything and everything.
It wasn’t always this way. What happened?
The new common language of the Endtime Money Snare is revealed — the numbers of money.
A World Colored with Hazardous Statistics
We live in a world of numbers. They shape our world in numerous ways, most of which are obvious. For example, all of today’s computer data systems are based on a numerical language. Networks, digital communications systems, and anything controlled by a microprocessor or integrated circuit are driven by numerical formulas and codes. The organization of our society — the entire world — centers around numbers. Phone numbers, street and house numbers, passwords, bank accounts, investment accounts and so on are all expressed in numerical digits. But, let’s not get hung up in a detailed account of the new mathematical theories and digital technologies that are sweeping the world. We are more interested in the application of numbers, how they are interpreted, and their influence upon our beliefs. More importantly, we want to better investigate their role in endtime events.
Numbers shape and form statistics. That fact allows statistics to be considered as the representatives of truth. But what if numbers lie?
Numeracy — the practice of documenting news, opinions and trends with numbers — is highly valued today. News reporters and researchers practice it carefully. If I did not exhibit some numeracy in writing this article — peppering its pages with statistics and footnotes — you, the reader, would surely find my views less credible. If I did not document trends by expressing various changes over a given period in terms of percentages, or by counting the growth or decline in the units of something, or referencing this information to reputable sources, you would be less able to assess the validity of my conclusions. Numeracy, therefore, is very useful when used in good measure.
Yet, an excessive fixation with numeracy can lead to dangers — ones that are extremely hazardous to anybody seeking to understand the times. How can numeracy — something that is innately useful — lead to peril? It serves as the springboard for three negative developments in our day: As a mechanism for widespread deception and misinformation; as a bridge to a world totally defined in terms of money; and lastly, to a world which chooses to accept numerical systems and mathematical theories in place of God … in other words, the Truth.
How a World Language of Money has Emerged
In my view, monetary numeracy — a common world language of money — has happened in several stages. It began with a fixation on quantification. Every trend and development is expressed in numerical terms, documented and captured in a statistical quantification. That in itself is not overly worrisome. Where the danger really lies is in the fact that our focus has moved from the real — the actual thing that is happening or being documented — to the statistic itself. The statistic now serves as a numerical image of the thing that is being quantified.
Just how accurate is this picture? Can numbers really capture all of the nuances of something that is real? Three apples on a table may be exactly that. But what does it mean that the annualized rate of inflation has fallen to 2.0% over the past month? Or, what is implied by the statistic that the teenage birth rate is declining by some percentage from the year before? These types of statistics require a more sophisticated interpretation. The image that these numbers portray can rarely be accepted at face value. More often than not, the real truth lies underneath this neat veneer of statistical precision. Though the numbers themselves are accurate, the truth can be very different from what seems obvious from the statistical headline.
To illustrate, let’s briefly examine the statistic about inflation. What does it really mean that inflation has fallen to 2.0%? To know this first requires an understanding about what inflation really is, which very few people actually possess. Alarmingly, very few financial professionals possess this knowledge either. Most accept the convenient and sanitized statistic of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) that is issued by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) at its face value. The same applies to similar measures reported by other national statistics agencies around the world. As it happens, real inflation is actually something very different. The CPI has grossly misrepresented real inflation trends this past decade. Yet, the CPI statistic is followed slavishly; it is accepted as truth. As a result, people may be being misled.
What about the statistic indicating that the teenage birth rate is declining? Yes, indeed, the teenage birth rate is declining. That appears to be a good development. But, again, what does this statistic really signify? Why is it declining? To be able to validly accept this statistic as either good or bad, we need to get in behind the number to discover its causality — its cause and effect. Are teenage births declining because of a decline in sexual activity, more effective birth control or both? Or, are births declining because abortions have increased? These are the relevant questions that require resolution in order to interpret the real meaning of the top-line statistic. As the case may be, the main contributing cause for the decline in teenage births in recent years is a rise in abortions. What seemed like such positive news actually disguises a disquieting trend. As such, we see that the real causes and effects can be overlooked — in fact, hidden — by statistics.
What George Orwell predicted would happen to words has also happened to numbers. In 1946, in an article called Politics and the English Language, he decried the deliberate misuse of words, writing that people craft their words “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Numeracy itself is not the danger. The danger is in shallowly accepting numbers as the image of truth with no further critical analysis. That is the vulnerability of our age — allowing statistical numbers to reign as reality and truth. It is very easy to allow this to happen. We live in a society bombarded by data and we virtually drown in a flood of numbers and information overload. People lead harried lives; there is too little time for critical analysis and too many statistics to process. It is easier to accept the “sound bites” of the statistics just as they appear. What they seem to mean becomes perception.
Statistics Shape False Perceptions even in Professional Circles
Surely only Mr. and Mrs. Couch Potato are vulnerable to these mistaken perceptions. If that was simply the case, statistical abuse would not be so much of a problem. The reality is that it also applies to professional people — the very same people who are more inclined to work with and depend upon numbers and statistics. I can certainly speak for the world’s financial and money industries. In my time as a senior financial executive, I discovered that very few people critically examined the true meanings of numbers and statistics. Little critical analysis takes place on Wall Street, not even by its financial analysts and economists. Very few economists actually understand the theory behind how statistics are calculated and derived in the first place. Even fewer understand the causes and effects that drive these statistics and the economic theories behind them. This is not an unfounded judgment. Sadly, the allegation is true. These people simply do not have the time to do real research or to diligently examine the real facts behind the numbers. A few of them do … but far too few to make any difference. It is much easier to accept the number at face value. Knowledge of the statistic passes for understanding.
What has happened then is that perception has become reality. The statistical number portrays the image that is perceived; therefore, this number has power because it can form and change popular perceptions. Reality and truth become inconsequential. Even worse, the truth becomes a liability if it is different from perception. Were we to take the time to examine a statistic and discover that its true meaning is very different than perception, it would not be very helpful. Why? Because almost everyone else will have accepted its face-value appearance for fact.
Let’s assume that the just-released economic statistic shows that the inflation level has declined. The majority of portfolio managers and investors will be sure to greet it as a positive development, perhaps quickly jumping into the market with new buy orders. The stock and bond markets lurch upward. The facts did not matter; perception did. Those that acted on the real facts lost out.
