Chapter 1 - What is the 29th day?

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Dwight D Eisenhower (1890 - 1969) - Military Leader, President of the United States

Something has happened in the 21st century which has never happened before. It is as significant as the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. It is frightening us because we do not know exactly what it is or why it has happened. What is worse, nobody else seems to know what it is or why it is happening either.

It was most visible in September, 2008, when the US Treasury Secretary told us that the financial system was on the verge of collapse and the US government had to act immediately to try to prevent it. The US Congress responded immediately by passing a Bill, many Representatives without even reading it, to appropriate $700 billion … and we began to hear the phrase “trillions of dollars”.

Many of us were terrified. How could this happen? How could the financial system be OK one day and collapsing the next day before we even heard about it? It seemed to be impossible.

Within days, other world governments were saying the same thing and responding in the same way. The largest banks, insurers, and investment banks were suddenly talking about bankruptcy.

Our retirement savings began to dwindle ...to evaporate ... to disappear, along with our retirement dreams.

The US Congress appropriated more hundreds of billions of dollars , again with many not reading the Bill, to stimulate an economy which we were told was suddenly on the verge of “depression”, a word that had not been used for 80 years.

Months later, we were told that only a small percentage of the money had actually been spent. If this was so serious, why was the response so slow? What was happening? Why was it happening? We still did not know. Nobody was convincing us that they knew.

The purpose of this book is to identify what is happening, why, and what we can do about it.

I am a mathematician (actually, an actuary) and there are two problems I have to try to overcome.

The first problem is that most of us are wary and even frightened of mathematicians and of mathematics. We were just glad when mathematics classes in school were finally over. “I don’t want to think about that stuff again ... ever!”, we said .

We are very uncomfortable trying to transfer mathematical ideas into real life. We would rather not do it. We would rather not even think about it. “Who really cares”, we say. “It has nothing to do with me”.

My experience with mathematicians is that we are notoriously poor communicators. We use numbers and symbols which nobody else understands. Perhaps it makes us feel superior to have a lock on an entire subject. We may even want people to think that we are smarter than everybody else. We have convinced people that mathematics is complicated. We have refused to use analogies and pictures and stories, which people can understand and get into their heads, to explain mathematical ideas.

For this book, my youngest daughter, a successful author, has offered suggestions about style, which have helped to improve the quality and the clarity of my writing.

In fact, mathematicians are not smarter than other people. We simply know things that most people do not know, in the same way that psychologists, carpenters, biophysicists, teachers, farmers, and others know things that most people do not know.

What is different about us is that we think in a different way than most people think.

In fact, mathematics is fairly easy to understand if it is communicated in ways that are familiar to us. The key is to get the mathematical idea into our heads in a way that is meaningful to us. So, in this book, there are no mathematical symbols, just analogies, pictures, and stories.

Remember. If you have a picture in your mind of how a mathematical concept works, that is just as good as understanding it in mathematical terms, perhaps even better.

The second problem is that reality does not work the way we thought it did. It just seemed to work the way we thought it did.

Throughout history, this did not really make much of a difference, which is why we were fooled and did not notice it. The differences between the way reality really works and the way we thought it works were fairly minor.

With the advent of computers and the internet, this is no longer true. Computers and the internet have unleashed a force which is rapidly accelerating these difference so much that reality is no longer working the way we think it should. This is because the way reality really works is moving away from the way we think reality works at an ever accelerating rate.

These “two realities” are becoming significantly different, for the first time in history.

As a result, we are becoming frightened and even angry because things are beginning to happen in a way that we do not understand. Problems are developing too quickly, solutions are being implemented too slowly – problems like the possibility of nuclear weapons in Iran, and the financial crisis we first heard about in September, 2008.

So, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, we have a choice – try to deal with these problems in the old way, which will be too slow and ineffective, or try to understand how reality really works and begin to address these problems in a new way.