 So, I was trying to come up with the best analogy for how economics is presented to the public, and I've narrowed it down to two. The Wizard of Oz and the Latin Bible. Bear with me. Whether or not you study or are even interested in economics, you will know one thing. It's complicated, and that's an understatement. But does it need to be as much as it is? Imagine economists as the Wizard of Oz, a giant, powerful, all-knowing talking head filled with some sort of ascended wisdom that the riff-raff are far too stupid to understand. Using incredibly obscure jargon, mathematical equations, convoluted models, and a PhD to back it all up. But in the end, it turns out to be mostly a big contraption of smoke and mirrors, and the economists are revealed to actually be the man behind the curtain. Just a regular mortal like you and I, however, ruling by a deceitful and fake facade. Or when the Catholic Church decreed that the Bible must only ever be written and spoken in Latin, and the educated kings had the time of their lives knowing that the uneducated and unwashed masses would have no way to tell if their translation of Scripture is true or total lies that the king recites to justify abuses of power. Such are mainstream economic doctrines. At its core, the economy is not the stock market, currency exchange rates, interest rates, booms and busts, or flashy charts that you see on Bloomberg and MSNBC. They are a part of it, but the economy is not the sum of these parts. The core of an economy is people and the choices they make. In fact, the definition of an economy is a system for the allocation of a society's scarce resources, not numbers moving up and down on a screen. One wise phrase that I got from one of my lecturers is that finance studies money, economics studies stuff. But economics is presented as finance to the public, like it's some sort of niche, scientific study of money and wealth. Economics is the study of people. We are people. The economy is us. Economics is a social science, not a hard science. Ludwig von Mises perfectly summed up why this is by saying that a human's actions are unique and non-repeatable. Whereas with a hard science like physics, you can use laboratory conditions to adequately measure environmental variables such as air temperature, pressure and object mass to calculate how quickly a hammer will hit the ground once it's dropped. What you absolutely cannot objectively measure is how humans will react to various changes, because humans are the most unpredictable things you could ever imagine trying to study. If there is one phrase that is used more than any other bio-economists, it is setteris paribus, which is Latin for all other things remain in constant. So it can be said, setteris paribus, a small amount of firms brings about higher prices. So you have two economic variables here, firms and prices, but explicitly ignore the immeasurable amount of factors that work in an economy in real time alongside them that can't be turned off and on by a switch like in a laboratory. My Latin Bible analogy works perfect here because those two words give economists a get out of jail free card to make absurdly sweeping claims and then base their actions off of them. And you might have heard the name Pareto before and likely him being given lots of praise. Vilfredo Pareto had a funny name but was originally an engineer who brought mass appeal for merging mathematical engineering concepts into the field of economics and as such he is the bane of my existence. Pareto tried to turn the social science into another kind of engineering and laid that foundation stone for Keynesian and neoclassical doctrine, which are the current mainstream, to base themselves off this false equivalency between social and hard sciences. Just as you would expect any mixing of two completely incompatible solutions, this mixture has been a disaster. Tipified by inflation, bubbles, tithany, and mass wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich. If that's true, then how the hell have we let it go on for nearly a hundred years? Well, it is a self-protecting disaster as the ones who commit it shroud their actions through what is an impenetrable mystery of numbers, equations, and meaningless terms for the layman. The truth is that economics can be adequately explained and understood by barely using any of them. If you want to study economics, of course you'll need a high level of mathematical and analytical skills, but to understand what an economy is and what economic institutions like central banks do, you just need to be an adult with common sense and time to read about it. But like the Latin Bible, this new economic language is maintained to hide the doctrines that harm you so greatly. If the Keynesians of the world actually spoke English instead of using fraudulent terms to describe concepts that already have words, society would see them for the snake oil merchants that they truly are, peddlers of a dud product for their own enrichment and empowerment at your expense. These fake wizards use their fake knowledge of the arcane to just tell politicians what they want to hear. Do this and it will give you more power. One day I'll make a video decoding Keynesian terms back into real English so you can see that their fanciful theories make little actual sense and in fact sound terrible when they can't dress it up and rephrase words to hide their true connotations. And for neoclassical economists there is no more joy for them than sitting at a desk all day trying to think of what they call market failures so they can publish a book that other neoclassical economists will buy and then scurry off like rodents to tell their politicians, look master, another opportunity for conquest. This whole process is even more of a farce as neoclassicals base these so-called market failures against what they call perfect competition. Once again an economy is a group of humans and humans are not and never will be perfect. So they go about searching for imperfections all day long amongst a gathering of imperfect humans and when they inevitably find them they go to another group of imperfect humans and tell them to plug the hole. But of course the plug is imperfect so it ends up creating a much bigger problem than there was before. Let me give you an example with the most egregious of their market failures and the one which is their most popular, what they call imperfect information. Imperfect information is not a market failure it is literally a market feature otherwise called specialization. The so-called market failure of imperfect information says that the seller of a product normally knows more about the product than the buyer therefore the seller can rip them off and that's a failure of the market. The market feature of specialization says through practice an individual becomes more skilled in a given field than his peers and can perform it better. If your goal as a seller is to sell goods for a higher price and you can do it then congratulations you're well specialized as you should be. If you in fact mislead a customer or sold them a faulty product then you've committed fraud and just to remind the neoclassicals we knew what fraud was long before you put your massive brains together to come to our rescue but there is one school of economic thought that demystifies the artificial barriers to understanding what an economy is why it works and why it crashes. It doesn't rely on models to prove its validity it recognizes that economics is a social science first and that mathematics makes sense in analysis but not in explanation. It recognizes humans and their institutions for the imperfect beings that they are and says that they are overall far more rational than the elitists give them credit for and if they are left to work things out themselves they will not only find a way they will find the best possible way that is the Austrian school of economics. The Austrian school is demonized by the mainstream because it completely undermines the ivory towers that they enjoy it makes the understanding of economics accessible to everyone and it makes brilliant sense all the way through from start to finish whether you've never taken an interest in economics before in your life or you've been studying it for decades. It describes economics not as a category of engineering or mathematics but one of praxeology meaning the study of human action. All the factories in the world won't do anything unless humans act upon them humanity is responsible for all economic activity ever to happen without our actions there would be no production chalking all subjective human action up to concrete rules of behavior is so ridiculous that only the intellectual class would have the naivety to do it so remember the talking heads for the naive sicker fans that they are remember the economy doesn't start with thousands of charts but starts with us and our choices and remember that governments are not benevolent but are made up of humans just as flawed if not more than everybody else these are the very first keys to understanding what economics actually is how economies work and how they can be manipulated against you this video will serve as my preamble for a series I will start working on explaining the basics of the Austrian school of economics so use this mindset daily keep it in mind and take it easy