Fixing the Economic System - a new Youtube presentation

Last Tuesday, I gave a lunchtime seminar at the prestigious Toulouse School of Economics.  I'd already invited myself to give a talk there back in March 2012, but on that occasion only four people turned up to hear me present my ideas on replacing the current tax system by a Flat Rate Universal Financial Transaction Tax.

This time, the turn out was much better, and there were about 20 people present. This was the title and abstract for my talk:

“Can a cognitive neuroscientist and amateur economist say anything of interest to real economists?”

Since the summer of 2010, I have become increasingly interested (some would say obsessed) with the economy. I have devoted thousands of hours to reading up on the subject, I’ve posted 480 pieces on my blog, which has had over 165,000 visits, produced 24 Youtube videos, given a TEDx talk on Tax reform, set up an association called “Monnaie Honnête” which is a member of the International Movement for Monetary Reform, and created an online exchange system called “OWE’M’ that allows credit creation by Citizens using an IOU based system. But, so far, I have had very little opportunity to get feedback from real economists. This talk could be the chance for the economists to prove to me that I have been talking garbage. Alternatively, there might be some useful ideas in there somewhere…. who knows? As a firm believer in the power of biological evolution, my personal belief is that the best strategy is to generate lots of variations, and let natural selection do the rest. I would claim that I have been generating lots of options, and that some of those ideas may be of interest.


You may well be wondering how things went. Well, not badly, I think. I was prettty pleased with what I had prepared. Indeed I had put a lot of effort into getting my key ideas into the talk, since I realized that it was fairly unlikely that I would get another chance in the near future.

I've now had time to generate a Youtube presentation of the same talk and so you will be able to find out what I said - if you have 60 minutes to spare.

Here's a link to the Youtube site

As you can see, I decided not to use the same title as I used at the Toulouse School of Economics seminar - I called it simply "Fixing the Economic System", although in fact the content is just about identical.  Do feel free to make comments, either here, or on the Youtube site.