The term ingenuity or applied ideas is used in the analysis of Thomas Homer-Dixon, building on that of Paul Romer, to refer to what is usually called instructional capital. Ingenuity is often inherent in creative individuals, and thus is considered hard to separate from individual capital. It is not clear if Dixon or Romer considered it impossible to do so, or if they were simply not familiar with the prior analysis of "applied ideas", "intellectual capital", "talent", or "innovation" where instructional and individual contributions have been carefully separated, by economic theorists.
I thought this link to Backreaction important.
Source Global Insight
See: World Gold Council
In regards to historical context of gold in relation to the American Dollar. What is it we see today in terms of Gold's value? An insecurity possibly on what was once a strong American Dollar, is now being undercut.
Addison Wiggin writes,
The power and influence of the United States in 1971 should not be ignored. It was the decision to go off the gold standard that, in effect, destroyed the orderly economic policies that had been possible through Bretton Woods. Introduction to the Demise of the Dollar ( John Wiley& Sons, 2005)
If effective changes were to be hidden within the society 's evolution why did it's citizens not know what was befalling them? Political deceptions practised? Was Nixon declaring bankruptcy?
Bretton_Woods_system
Free trade relied on the free convertibility of currencies. Negotiators at the Bretton Woods conference, fresh from what they perceived as a disastrous experience with floating rates in the 1930s, concluded that major monetary fluctuations could stall the free flow of trade.
The liberal economic system required an accepted vehicle for investment, trade, and payments. Unlike national economies, however, the international economy lacks a central government that can issue currency and manage its use. In the past this problem had been solved through the gold standard, but the architects of Bretton Woods did not consider this option feasible for the postwar political economy. Instead, they set up a system of fixed exchange rates managed by a series of newly created international institutions using the U.S. dollar (which was a gold standard currency for central banks) as a reserve currency.
Satisfying the Immediate Needs
So given information about the circumstances in society and the requirement of dealing with the sustainability of life, calculations had to be made that allow people those moments of creativity. So given the service industry and making free the ability to play, insightful moments produced a culture that was allowed these intimate moments, while it was necessary to make sure life dealt with the needs of sustainability.
So increase demands on the culture to apply themselves, and reducing the amount of money available, reinforces the dependency on self to make sure that life is taken care of. What adverse reaction does this place on those moments of creativity?
Artistic expansionism from Scientific valuation
Immediately what came to mind is the avenues of artist research into the methods of perspective and dimensional interpretation of form. While being given the "limits of knowledge in terms of geometric proportions" may be evident when an artist applies himself to what is understood in those limits?
Art Mirrors Physics Mirrors Art, by Stephen G. Brush
Arthur Miller addresses an important question: What was the connection, if any, between the simultaneous appearance of modern physics and modern art at the beginning of the 20th century? He has chosen to answer it by investigating in parallel biographies the pioneering works of the leaders of the two fields, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. His brilliant book, Einstein, Picasso, offers the best explanation I have seen for the apparently independent discoveries of cubism and relativity as parts of a larger cultural transformation. He sees both as being focused on the nature of space and on the relation between perception and reality.
The suggestion that some connection exists between cubism and relativity, both of which appeared around 1905, is not new. But it has been made mostly by art critics who saw it as a simple causal connection: Einstein's theory influenced Picasso's painting. This idea failed for lack of plausible evidence. Miller sees the connection as being less direct: both Einstein and Picasso were influenced by the same European culture, in which speculations about four-dimensional geometry and practical problems of synchronizing clocks were widely discussed.
The French mathematician Henri Poincaré provided inspiration for both Einstein and Picasso. Einstein read Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis (French edition 1902, German translation 1904) and discussed it with his friends in Bern. He might also have read Poincaré's 1898 article on the measurement of time, in which the synchronization of clocks was discussed--a topic of professional interest to Einstein as a patent examiner. Picasso learned about Science and Hypothesis indirectly through Maurice Princet, an insurance actuary who explained the new geometry to Picasso and his friends in Paris. At that time there was considerable popular fascination with the idea of a fourth spatial dimension, thought by some to be the home of spirits, conceived by others as an "astral plane" where one can see all sides of an object at once. The British novelist H. G. Wells caused a sensation with his book The Time Machine (1895, French translation in a popular magazine 1898-99), where the fourth dimension was time, not space.
So given some insight in to artist rendition what value, when we find such moments conducive to sitting at a stream, and it;s ability to let the mind wonder free with that creative flow? You had to know yourself, and understand what was inspirational.
Penrose's Influence on Escher
During the later half of the 1950’s, Maurits Cornelius Escher received a letter from Lionel and Roger Penrose. This letter consisted of a report by the father and son team that focused on impossible figures. By this time, Escher had begun exploring impossible worlds. He had recently produced the lithograph Belvedere based on the “rib-cube,” an impossible cuboid named by Escher (Teuber 161). However, the letter by the Penroses, which would later appear in the British Journal of Psychology, enlightened Escher to two new impossible objects; the Penrose triangle and the Penrose stairs. With these figures, Escher went on to create further impossible worlds that break the laws of three-dimensional space, mystify one’s mind, and give a window to the artist heart.
To do with Less
So it comes full circle then that demands placed on people given the change i society, asks that we look to what we really need in life to support not only one's family, but the ability to work responsibly within in the confines of the dollars we work for. What is it's meaning then?
If we see the direction Gold is taking, can we then not surmise the valuation of monetary systems need to undergo a correction? Given that circumstance, what value do you place in Pensions knowing it is part of a unfunded liability that could disappear in a heart beat?
So immediately the baby boomers need to some calculations as well as set the pace for reforms. This will transfer down with the framework of society through that adjustment become what is acceptable once dependency on a manufacturing based is realized again. New technologies, replacing worn out old ones.
What about oil and gas, electricity as energy dependencies?
This presents the opportunity to apply the skills we need to undergo change and develop societal valuations on it's commodities.
Tabula rasa (Latin: scraped tablet or clean slate) refers to the epistemological thesis that individual human beings are born with no innate or built-in mental content, in a word, "blank", and that their entire resource of knowledge is built up gradually from their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world. See Tabula rasa: The Glass Room