Give It Away #16 The Spirit of the Financial Times Half a lifetime ago, when I started out at university, my major was economics, of all things. At the end of my first year of undergrad, I finished at the top of the entire freshman class. But I wasn't satisfied by my studies, I didn't enjoy what I was learning, I couldn't figure out how to apply cold calculus to improve the human condition. So I switched my major to psychology, so I could try to understand the human mind. I'm very glad that I did, and to this day I enjoy learning new scientific facts about the way that we think and feel, and the way that we act on our thoughts and feelings. But ever since, economics has been in my blind spot; it's my Achilles heel, and I can't seem to find any shoe that will fit on it. A few years ago, an independently-made documentary movie grabbed my attention when it became the most downloaded film of all time in 2007. It also screened at the prestigious Artivist Film Festival in Hollywood, California, where film industry activists gave it institutional support. That film deals with a wide range of topics, including the history of Chrisitianity and the World Trade Center attacks. In the wake of its incredible underground success, the team behind Zeitgeist put out a sequel called Addendum that deals mainly with money matters: the history of modern banking and international finance. Addendum's thorough economic analysis stunned and scared me; I now know a lot more about money, but I'm still not sure what to do about it. I invite you to watch the film online and let me know what you think of it. Most of the time, I focus on specific issues and organizations that demand our attention, as a caring and compassionate community. But since this blog is all about philanthropy, the redistribution of large sums of money, I think it's important that on occasion, we zoom out from the micro to the macro, and ask ourselves if the overall banking system that is the infrastructure for all of our economic activities is what we want it to be. With the entire country of Greece in receivership and several other European countries teetering on the brink of economic collapse, I'd say it's high time we had a conversation about managing money on a national level! Now since I know that you've got plenty of other important things to do, and you probably can't be bothered to listened to somebody blab on and on about banking for over two hours, I'm going to put together a little listener's guide for you. First off, skip the first five minutes of the film, unless you're in the mood for a philosophic introduction. Watch it from the 5-minute mark until 25 minutes into the film. At that point, they start discussing the effects of economics on foreign policy, with commentary by John Perkins, author of New York Times best-seller Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. After half an hour of geopolitical analysis, futurist Jacque Fresco presents his innovative architectural designs, and proclaims that these are the solutions to all that ails our society. The Addendum film has become so popular that it has spawned a network of interest groups across North America and beyond. There's even a Zeitgeist group here in Israel that promotes these ideas. I'm not going to use this space to analyze Fresco's architectural ideas -- personally, I believe that his models do not take into account the amount of fossil fuel energy that we can realistically expect to have at our disposal, to build a better industrial infrastructure. But regardless of which solution will save us -- it would seem that the Zeitgeist analysis of American banking is infallible. Watch at least the first 25 minutes, and then let's have a conversation about what we need to do about it.