Hmm, I don't live in SF, so I will tune in when it gets uploaded on the past programs.
Well, I don't know what was talked about and what wasn't, so if I repeat things...sorry.
Well, I like to think back to the story about the island of Locche(sp?). On this island, it was agreed upon that all the giant boulders will be the currency. So when one family sells the house to another, the ownership of the boulders simply go to the other family. Then one day, a man decided that he wants to move the boulder to his own resident. He loaded the boulders onto a ship. Unfortunately, the ship and the boulder sunk down to the bottom of the sea along the way.
is the money lost? No! The boulder is still there, at the bottom of the sea. It still represents value, it is just that we don't see it.
Similarly, the US currency behaves the same way (since we left the gold standard). The currency, or money, are simply agreed upon boulders that we trade with. Even if the currency aren't visible (ie maybe in the bank), we can still trade it.
The financial crisis is cause, among many other reasons, a misinformation. One day, the man accidently wrote down that he has 2x more boulders than reality. In short, he just created values. Eventually, someone will figure it out...and there goes a boom in the economy. Hope that helps.
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Here is my philosophical question. I feel that the phrase, money makes the world go round, is inherently wrong. Let us imagine that tomorrow morning, all of the dimes became stone x. After some brief panic, we finally calmed down and conclude that although it is not a dime, we can substitute it as a dime. over time, this stone x becomes the new representative for dimes.
Then this shows that money isn't really concrete. How can something non-concrete make the world go round? It must be something that money represent that makes the world go round rather the physical thing we call money.
And I argue that it is human greed and desires that make the world go round. It is merely that we human exhibits greed and gain desires through this medium we call money. Then my question becomes:
Even in a world without money, with unlimited resources (which is inherently contradictory to economics), will there still be greed?
In physics, there is a concept where essentially the power to create anything out of its fundamental particles. If we ever harness such ability/technology, then we can create a jean at our will (or anything we desire). There is almost an unlimited amount of fundamental particles..and it's recycled into the universe (conserved). In this world, is there no greed?
Ben Zheng
Note: I apologize for my grammar and lack of formal structure. Please excuse the HS student. X_X

Great show. Very informative. And I agree with the guest, an hour was far too short!
Of course, after listening I kept mulling the banks, the bailouts, and the stimulus package and oddly enough settled on the notion of philosophy and infrastructure.
This wasn't entirely a left hand turn for me, for as an independent business journalist living in Charleston, South Carolina, I've written a great deal on ports, international trade, supply chain issues and the vast improvements we need to make to the nation's (and world's)infrastructure to enhance trade efficiencies.
All of which is a long way to say, has infrastructure and its uses and misuses been the subject of philosophical inquiry in the past (I don't know of any direct examples), and also are there philosophical "schools of thought" or approaches, you'd like to see considered as proposals for major infrastructure projects go forward.
A little off thetopic of the program itself, but it's what I was thinking about immedidately afterwards.
Dan

Our monetary system is based on debt. Alex demonstrated this with the example of how banks extend credit, by maintaining a mere 10% of our savings funds in the bank. The vast majority of the money in our society is created in this way, and because of this, banks hold all the cards to fueling our economy. Their decisions, on to whom and on what conditions to lend money, determines our economy, ultimately determining whether money is spent on schools or on skyscrapers, on healthcare for botox treatements and viagra and balding old guys or to cure malaria and TB and AIDS. Our monetary system is sick and corrupted and needs reform. The FED needs to be nationalized. Banks should not be allowed to play the stockmarket and neither should our retirement funds.
This website is a great source of information and I recommended it highly.
www.monetary.org