Humans, Being Clever

THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT IN HUMAN HISTORY, according to Einstein, the greatest invention of the human mind, is compound interest. Hard to argue that, but the very concept of money itself seems quite cleaver in its own right, a very creative human mental trick. Trading horses for cows directly, or labor for food, bartering, works well enough that it was used for millennia, but in a modern high tech world, greater speed and convenience are needed. And lo and behold, right before our very eyes, money is getting all the more clever, as the numerous forms of money multiply. Whoever can explain exactly what in the heck a "derivative " is, please share. I never, ever thought I would use plastic; now I use nothing else. Electronic money at the speed of light is our latest, greatest achievement, something perhaps even Einstein never thought of, though I wouldn't put it past him. But human cleverness doesn't stop there. Oh no, not by any means. We homo sapien sapiens are far too clever to merely turn electromagnetism into money and leave it at that. Leave it to our corporate masters to give us, (along with corporate mastery) a rich variety of quite clever financial instruments ranging from dividends to derivatives, the latter of which no less a financial wizard than Warren Buffet accurately described as "weapons of mass financial destruction." Alas, our beneficent corporate masters are willing, able, and ready to do whatever it takes to suck up wealth from far below. Maybe we'll someday be clever enough to provide sufficient prosperity for all to enable us to ease up on the greedy cleverness, and to invest in sensible, sustainable economic cleverness.