John Chang
Jedi
I'm not sure where to put this, feel free to move it. When I first really understood how debt and money work, I was disturbed by the implied exponential growth.
The whole system requires exponential population growth, demands new people to hold the new debt constantly being created out of thin air. The total debt of the economy can be effectively expressed as exp(kt), where k is the interest rate. That's of course, if k is real valued. But what if you required k to be imaginary?
Then, you get a whole different system - one that oscillates in two directions, doesn't grow. And with the right summation series, you can approximate a constant function, and cancel out the imaginary parts. Think about it - a steady-state economy.
But what would an imaginary interest rate look like?
The whole system requires exponential population growth, demands new people to hold the new debt constantly being created out of thin air. The total debt of the economy can be effectively expressed as exp(kt), where k is the interest rate. That's of course, if k is real valued. But what if you required k to be imaginary?
Then, you get a whole different system - one that oscillates in two directions, doesn't grow. And with the right summation series, you can approximate a constant function, and cancel out the imaginary parts. Think about it - a steady-state economy.
But what would an imaginary interest rate look like?
