The riddle of ‘Big’ Ben and the Sage

In the red corner:

Our modern-day approach to life owes a lot to the principles of economics

We all end up learning these principles the easy way or the hard way – from parents, teachers, bosses, customers, competitors, friends, landlords etc….

I will present a gist of these principles here

(To be on the safe side, I have taken the principles from ‘Big’ Ben Bernanke’s book, and if you can’t trust the US Fed reserve board chairman to know economics, who can you trust?:-)

 

Scarcity is a fundamental fact of life.

There is never enough time, money or energy to do everything we want to do or have everything we would like to have.

Although we have boundless needs and wants, the resources available to us are limited.

More of one thing means less of another.

So, we have to make choices in a scarce world and society faces the result of these choices.

 

Okie. Nice. Smart dude! That explains why we are all slogging our backsides off and lunging at each other’s throats!

 

In the blue corner:

We now hop into a time machine, set the timer to a period from 1000 BC – 1 BC and land up in a forest, somewhere in India

We stumble upon an ancient text with only 18 verses, which I heard was written during this period;

Later, in the 20^th century, Gandhi would go on to claim that it was the summit of human wisdom

(Its opening lines are as follows)

All this is full. All that is full.

From fullness, fullness comes.

When fullness is taken from fullness,

Fullness still remains.

 

Uh-Oh! It looks like we have a face-off between the Fed reserve board chairman and an anonymous author in the forest in the 1^st Millennium BC.

 

It is a riddle of scarcity vs abundance.

In my humble opinion, solving this riddle is the single biggest favor we can do to ourselves, future generations and the planet

 

Who is correct?

Whose math is wrong?

We’ll explore this soon.

Hint: You can solve this on your own…by staring hard at the red line