For writeup, see: http://bit.ly/AZUSD - This podcast explain the origin of dollar based trading system in Bretton Woods. The Nixon Shock of 1971 delinked dollars from gold, and led to the Petro-dollar system which continues to this day. This gives massive advantage to the USA, allowing it to spend more on military then the next ten countries combined. For various reasons, US hegemony is crumbling and the search is on for alternatives. Very likely, a multi-polar currency will emerge, where European Union, BRICS, and perhaps others will create alternatives to the Dollar

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://azprojects.wordpress.com/2022/08/08/how-power-shapes-our-thoughts/ We are used to thinking of "knowledge" as valid information about the world we live in. However, our knowledge consists of information we have received from history books and textbooks, which form part of our syllabus at schools. If the educational system, and the syllabus, is produced by those in power, to achieve specific goals, then our knowledge will reflect these biases, without our being aware of them. That is, we can be educated to believe that the social, political, and economic systems we live in are the best possible, instead of realizing their flaws, and working to fix them. This is the power/knowledge thesis of Micheal Foucault, which says that the knowlege that we have about the world is systematically shaped to reflect the interests of the powerful. The thesis is explained in this episode.

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://azprojects.wordpress.com/2022/07/07/life-journey-3-intellectual-history-of-europe/

We start from the premise that economics in particular, and the social sciences in general, are presented as "sciences", but in fact are eurocentric prejudices. Why is this case? To understand why such an obviously mistaken claim currently dominates the university curricula, we need to look at the intellectual history of Europe. Over a century of bloody religious warfare led to the necessity of rebuilding the foundations of society and state on a secular basis, safe from the controversies of religion. However, one cannot create social sciences without moral foundations. This paradox was resolved by concealing the toxic moral foundations of modern secular sciences in the code word "rationality". Modern social sciences codify lessons from European historical experience, but are not applicable to other societies.