The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta 2

[FRED]

First in a series of videos that depict at a high level how Peak Cheap Oil, Debt Deflation, and Monetary Reform will shape the next ten years of economic change.

beta 1 - Jan. 1, 2011


beta 2 - Jan. 3, 2011

[LargoWinch]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

One is hard enough to follow, but three at a time?!

PS: Happy New Year FRED.

[metalman]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

One is hard enough to follow, but three at a time?!

PS: Happy New Year FRED.

longing for the old days... bubbles... up & down, not round & round.

[globaleconomicollaps]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

in honor of the new year
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MXgc8wzfC4

[pksubs]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

nice ! Happy new year!!

[jk]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

i like the illustration of the pcoc, and look forward to the other 2, and then an animation showing how they affect each other's timing. i think this kind of presentation could be very effective in illustrating complex feedbacks in how the cycles interact to speed or slow each other.

[tastymannatees]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

Opening graphic is good, spinning wheels at the end with electric sparks hard to watch.

Who is your market on this? I sell technical products to average & technical computer endusers and through many failures and some modest successes I found I can not sell to 98% of the people wearing my engineering hat, my approach over the years evolved to simpler graphics, explanations so at a glance most get the message out of the gate, not easy to do for more complex issues like electronics or economics. Engineers/technical people make the worst sales/marketing people.

I do a lot of internet marketing, simplify the message, make it user friendly. Look for examples like the talking bears cartoon from xtranormal.com they went viral on the financial blogs explaining quantitative easing, buy the dip, and the latest one on silver. Relatively complicated issues can be communicated more effectively than a powerpoint slide presentation where the end consumer has to struggle some to get the idea. Rather than do a power point at my next fortune 500 presentation I am using a couple of talking robots and everybody I have shown it to for critical feedback liked it, even the engineers.

Why not run a contest? Put up an FAQ on the info you want included, xtranormal is free to do basic cartoons and is really easy to do. offer prizes of free subscriptions to ITulip members maybe 2 years for winner 1year for runner up and you own the final product. There are lot of smart, funny people on this forum why not leverage them to get the message out?

[jk]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

Opening graphic is good, spinning wheels at the end with electric sparks hard to watch.

Who is your market on this? I sell technical products to average & technical computer endusers and through many failures and some modest successes I found I can not sell to 98% of the people wearing my engineering hat, my approach over the years evolved to simpler graphics, explanations so at a glance most get the message out of the gate, not easy to do for more complex issues like electronics or economics. Engineers/technical people make the worst sales/marketing people.

I do a lot of internet marketing, simplify the message, make it user friendly. Look for examples like the talking bears cartoon from xtranormal.com they went viral on the financial blogs explaining quantitative easing, buy the dip, and the latest one on silver. Relatively complicated issues can be communicated more effectively than a powerpoint slide presentation where the end consumer has to struggle some to get the idea. Rather than do a power point at my next fortune 500 presentation I am using a couple of talking robots and everybody I have shown it to for critical feedback liked it, even the engineers.

Why not run a contest? Put up an FAQ on the info you want included, xtranormal is free to do basic cartoons and is really easy to do. offer prizes of free subscriptions to ITulip members maybe 2 years for winner 1year for runner up and you own the final product. There are lot of smart, funny people on this forum why not leverage them to get the message out?

might be worth trying to figure out what the message is before you try to simplify it. as i understand this graphic, the pcoc is just the first of 3 cycles to elucidate. and it's the easiest and most explored of the 3 - at least everyone in this community should be able to follow it easily. i'm eagerly waiting for the other 2, but i'm not holding my breath.

you might be able to do most of the "debt deflation" cycle, but the "monetary reform" one isn't obvious, and how those 2 interact needs attention before you can bring in pcoc. so, as i see it, much work remains before this is ready for prime time. in the meanwhile, it helps to further discussion here.

one other comment on this graphic: i think "energy tax surge" needs to be reworded, or at least put "energy tax" in quotes. when i first read it, i thought you- fred and/or ej - were implying that there would be e.g. windfall profits taxes added to the energy price, then i realized you were referring to the simile that high energy prices act like a tax, reducing consumption of other goods and services, and so slowing the economy.

[bill]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

Crisis, drives change. We better get our act together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhz9gVkwu-A

[aaron]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

I did not like it.

The contest idea above is a good one.

[EJ]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

There's a reason why we use the term "beta" in the title of this video. This tried and true software versioning nomenclature indicates: "Not the final production version." At the risk of creating some confusion, we thought our members might be interested to see what we are up to in our ongoing project to determine the direction of the economy over the next decade, as a work in progress rather than waiting the additional weeks or months -- we never know -- that we will need to complete it.

I'm glad we did put out beta 1 because the video elicited a number of constructive responses, several of which will be incorporated into subsequent versions.

On the comparison of our animation to the xtranormal.com animations there are several crucial differences. Ours is not a depiction of a past event occurring in isolation, the way the xtranormal.com animation explains the event of the Fed deploying quantitative easing.

We are attempting to use animations to depict the methods that I employed to determine the processes that predict future events that led to my decision to avoid stocks and remain invested in Treasury bonds and gold ten years ago.

One explains the past, the other depicts the future.

One explains a relatively simple event, the other a complex set of interacting processes.

On the question of simplicity, of whether we can explain the processes more simply, the answer is that this is the simplified version.

The version that actually goes into the asset allocation and timing decisions is far more complex, involving tertiary and sub-processes, but we figured we'd have our hands full trying to explain the simplified version of the process model.

Any effort to simplify it further will introduce too many inaccuracies. This is always the case. Simplifying a complex system in order to make it more easily understood necessarily introduces inaccuracies. The more simplified an explanation of a process becomes, the farther it moves from the substance of the process, the closer the explanation comes to being misleading. For example, you could say accurately that the book Moby Dick is a book about a whale but that hardly explains what the book is really about. The xtranormal.com video does a decent job of explaining QE, except that the trade-off between simplification and accuracy introduced many errors. Anyone with a background in economics is left wondering if the producers intentionally reduced complex concepts to more simple yet inaccurate ones to make the subject more approachable to the audience or if maybe the don't really understand how QE works.

I'd estimate that an xtranormal video takes perhaps 10 to 20 hours to produce, maybe less. Modern animation programs automatically synch characters to voice data, and xtranormal is using computer generated voices. They write the script, create a few backgrounds, and the rest is largely automated. Hard to say how long it took us to develop our video, if you include all of the research that went into developing the concepts it describes. Several thousand hours at least.

The future is harder to depict than the past. But even complex processes that are well defined in the present cannot always be simplified. I have friends in the biotechnology industry who will try to explain concepts to me in layman's terms but the problem is that without the vocabulary of biological concepts there is no way to explain complex biological processes. Consider the following video, one of my iTulip video archive favorites.

Could the producer have simplified this video further? I don't think so, not without leaving out some crucial part of the process depicted.

The iTulip Next Ten Years animation include only the most critical processes. It introduces the idea that the greatest challenge in the forecast is in the interaction of these processes. You could say that the high level message of the animation, once it is completed, is that the next ten years will be extremely complicated and unpredictable. Many major changes will be occurring at once. We'll do our best to simplify and clarify in future versions, but there is no getting away from the fact that if we want to make an accurate forecast, we have to remain true to the behavior of the relevant processes and they are not simple.

[zoog]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

First in a series of videos that depict at a high level how Peak Cheap Oil, Debt Deflation, and Monetary Reform will shape the next ten years of economic change.

I'm not crazy about videos but that's kinda cool. I think you have to try multiple methods of getting ideas across, because people learn in different ways. You misspelled "achieved" by the way.

[dbarberic]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

i'm eagerly waiting for the other 2, but i'm not holding my breath.

If there is one compliant I have about iTulip, it is that articles often mention "part II", or "next part", or some follow up line; and I wait and wait and wait, but there never is a follow up article written and posted.

[FRED]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

Update, as promised.

[vinoveri]

Re: The Next 10 Years: Three Drivers of Economic Change beta1

Update, as promised.

Thanks for this.
Can you explain how the MR piece has a 2-3 yr duration wheras the DD has a 10-20 yr duration; is time=zero the same for both or if not, when do they overlap? Does not the return to a "gold standard" follow the currency and bond crisis?
When is time zero?