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Is that because you don't understand your own posts?

If you want to help people understand, you should figure out how to explain it yourslf. Telling people they have to read a whole book to get an answer to a simple question just makes it look like you have no idea at all.

I enjoyed the videos...well, sort of  
It was a very good crash course (probably about an hour) to get a better understanding, or at least a different perspective on where our economy may be at today.

Personally, I agree with the information shown. I've never had any misconceptions that exponential growth reliant on finite resources cannot continue beyond a finite length of time.

Unfortunately, when the exponentiality reaches it's limits, simple mathematics tells you that it's going to be a very sudden realisation that our system was a ponzi scheme just like so many others.

All indications are that saturation point is very close indeed without an infinite energy source that can cope with the required economic growth.

I'm sort of looking forward to the next chapter.i

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I have a question, not parameters. Or should I ask, what do you mean by parameters?

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It usually refers to borrowing to invest.

Leverage & Deleveraging (Cont)

So, at last, that’s it, that’s all there is, CORRECT?
Well, actually no! There’s quite a bit more!

For starters, we have only talked about Real or Tangible Debt, where Private Individuals, Business & Government have acquired Assets of a Physical or Intellectual Property nature, which were funded by future Earnings.

But for many decades now, Politicians (in many countries), Economists & others, have also Borrowed from the future, in order to fund various issues of their day, thinking that the future would always grow and generate the funds needed, then.
THE POLITICIANS & ECONOMISTS WERE WRONG!

Tomorrow has now become today & just as the Baby Boomers are starting to retire, the promise of their pensions, their Self Funded Superannuation schemes, Share Markets, Real Estate prices & their Aging medical care, ARE ALL EVAPORATING, leaving a mountain of UNFUNDED OR UNDERFUNDED Government Liabilities, which do not show up as Debt, but these Liabilities will need to be paid in full, thus greatly increasing future Debt or paid in part or defaulted on and any of those actions will make an already bad situation, worse, in some way or another!


Above is a snapshot of the Canadian situation, where the total Population is somewhat higher than Australia, but the Demographics situation is similar to OZ & for that matter much of the world. It is the Baby Boomer Bulge that is set to cause so many difficulties, with not only unfunded Pension & Medical Liabilities, but also the substantial decline in Demand that must come in all areas of Products & Services, as the following generations are relatively less in numbers, but they will also be less well endowed financially, as this GFC wears on, year after year!  
In the case of the USA, the unfunded Liabilities are estimated at anything from US$50-$80 Trillion!



The above chart demonstrates how expenditure and investment changes during various periods of life. Whilst the chart suggests that Spending Peaks at 46.5 years and savings then start to take precedent, I usually prefer the range between 45-55 years old, with 50 being the Peak.  
Whichever is the case, the boomer generation decline in spending & increase in savings, will now become increasingly noticeable and that will contribute towards Deleveraging & the slowing of the overall Global Economy!

So, paying down Private, Business & Government Debt, plus unfunded Government Liabilities, that’s all there is, CORRECT?
Well, actually no! There’s more, quite a bit more!

You see, the entire Global Monetary system is based on the proposition that the Economy will, in fact MUST, continue to grow forever, so the entire Economic system is leveraged to a claim that Future Earnings will always be exponentially larger than before, which contravenes at least 2 basic laws –
1)      The laws of nature prescribe that exponential growth of anything, is not possible in a finite world!
2)      Dr Albert Bartlett’s First law of Sustainability, is that Population growth (human) &/or growth in the rates of Consumption of Resources CAN NOT BE SUSTAINED!

But our Monetary system is not the only Macro Economic factor, which involves our Economic system Leveraging that Factor against Future Earnings and where the system assumes the exponential growth of that factor!

Also in that same boat, the Titanic, are –
1)      The never ending Growth of Human Population, which delivers a claim of future human labour.
2)      An ever improving pool of human Knowledge & Innovation, which delivers on the necessity for future claims on increased Productivity.
3)      A Limitless Supply of Cheap & Abundant Energy, including Transport, which is necessary to enable all of the other claims on the future, to become reality!    

Let me be abundantly clear, Exponential Growth of anything, in a finite world, IS NOT POSSIBLE, over time and we are now approaching a many of those limits!
All of the above will eventually come to an end, the only thing in doubt, IS THE MATTER OF TIMING.
That said, human Population growth & Energy Supply are now Peaking and within a relatively short span of time, both will start to Decline, without mitigation having started.

There is then, only one remaining possible bastion of hope for the Monetary, Economic system and a massive Global Deleveraging against future expectations and that is that the human condition of Intellect, will outweigh the other human conditions of Wrath, Greed, Sloth, Pride, Lust, Envy & Gluttony?

Now, that may be entirely possible and I hope it is!

But I just don’t believe that good Global Economic Policy, with so much riding on the outcomes, can be left to such a wing & a prayer?

Good luck & watch the Debt!

I didn't ask you to copy and paste a bunch of possible meanings. I asked you what you meant when you used the term.

The Paradox of Capitalism: The Relevance of John Maynard Keynes

John Maynard Keynes, though bourgeois in his outlook, was a remarkably insightful economist, whose book Economic Consequences of the Peace was copiously quoted by Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International to argue that conditions had ripened for the world revolution.  But even Keynes' insights could not fully comprehend the paradox that is capitalism.

In a famous essay "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren", written in 1930, Keynes had argued: "Assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years.  This means that the economic problem is not, if we look into the future, the permanent problem of the human race" (emphasis in the original).

True, after Keynes had written there was the Second World War, but thereafter mankind has had six and a half decades without any "important war" of the sort that could interrupt what he had called the "era of progress and invention".  And the rate of population growth has also not accelerated to a point that can be considered to have invalidated Keynes' premise.

Dichotomy Structurally Inbuilt in Capitalism
Keynes missed this structural aspect of capitalism.  His entire argument in fact was based on the mere logic of compound interest, i.e. on the sheer fact that "if capital increases, say, 2 percent per annum, the capital equipment of the world will have increased by a half in twenty years, and seven and a half times in a hundred years".  From this sheer fact it follows that output too would have increased more or less by a similar order of magnitude, and mankind, with so much more of goods at its disposal, would have overcome the struggle for subsistence.  The reason Keynes assumed that an increase in the mass of goods would eventually benefit everyone lies not just in his inability to see the antagonistic nature of the capitalist mode of production (and its antagonistic relationship with the surrounding universe of petty producers), but also in his belief that capitalism is a malleable system which can be moulded, in accordance with the dictates of reason, by the interventions of the State as the representative of society.  He was a liberal and saw the state as standing above, and acting on behalf of, society as a whole, in accordance with the dictates of reason.  The world, he thought, was ruled by ideas; and correct, and benevolent, ideas would clearly translate themselves into reality, so that the increase in mankind's productive capacity would get naturally transformed into an end of the economic problem.  If the antagonism of capitalism was pointed out to Keynes, he would have simply talked about state intervention restraining this antagonism to ensure that the benefit of the increase in productive capacity reached all.

The state, instead of being an embodiment of reason, which intervenes in the interests of society as a whole, as liberalism believes, acts to defend the class interests of the hegemonic class, and hence to perpetuate the antagonisms of the capitalist system.

Antagonisms in Three Distinct Ways
These antagonisms perpetuate in three quite distinct ways the struggle for subsistence in which the bulk of mankind is caught.  The first centres around the fact that the level of wages in the capitalist system depends upon the relative size of the reserve army of labour.  And to the extent that the relative size of the reserve army of labour never shrinks below a certain threshold level, the wage rate remains tied to the subsistence level despite significant increases in labour productivity, as necessarily occur in the "era of progress and innovation".  Work itself therefore becomes a struggle for subsistence and remains so.  Secondly, those who constitute the reserve army of labour are themselves destitute and hence condemned to an even more acute struggle for subsistence, to eke out for themselves an even more meager magnitude of goods and services.  And thirdly, the encroachment by the capitalist mode upon the surrounding universe of petty production, whereby it displaces petty producers, grabs land from the peasants, uses the tax machinery of the State to appropriate for itself, at the expense of the petty producers, an amount of surplus value over and above what is produced within the capitalist mode itself, in short, the entire mechanism of "primitive accumulation of capital", ensures that the size of the reserve army always remains above this threshold level.

The growth rates of world output have been even greater in the post-war period than in Keynes' time.  The growth rates in particular capitalist countries like India have been of an order unimaginable in Keynes' time, and yet there is no let-up in the struggle for subsistence on the part of the bulk of the population even within these countries.

Keynes' faith in the miracle of compound interest would be justified in a socialist order, but not in a capitalist one.
Link -
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21603
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As Socrates said, "The first step to wisdom is realizing that we know nothing."

Well, perhaps not nothing, but clearly Keynes did not aniticpate everything correctly and I suspect, nor do many of the Pollies, Economists or Establishment, Now!