All right, I guess it's about 10, so let's get started. So thank you all for coming. I do have to apologize. I know I don't think I'm going to be able to put on as good a show as Judge Napolitano would. But hopefully, at least, I can tell you something interesting about what I think is one of the more intriguing problems in applied economics or applied Austrian economics. And that is the economics of war and of war-making. So this is actually a theme that has been studied repeatedly in Austrian economics over the years. Going back, particularly people like Mises and Lionel Robbins were very interested in it. But it's also not one of those topics that you see discussed very often in sort of conventional surveys of Austrian contributions to economics. But Austrians have been interested in this topic for a very long time. And so I'm going to show a little bit of that to you as we go through this lecture today. What I'm mainly going to be talking about is trying to give you a sort of survey of some distinctly Austrian insights into the economics of war. Because as I hope to show, Austrians do have some unique ways of looking at this problem and some unique ways of answering questions about things like what wars are, what makes wars possible, the economic causes of war, how wars are prosecuted, and hopefully something about how wars end and maybe could be prevented in the future. So there's a lot of Austrian writings on this topic, as I said, and I hope to get through those in the next few minutes. Another thing I do have to sort of maybe apologize for is that I am taking the most recent iteration of this lecture. In previous years, versions of this talk had been given by people like the late Ralph Raco and Robert Higgs, who are just terrific scholars and were real masters of this subject. Instead of trying to do a sort of a poor imitation of their work, I'm hoping to take a slightly different tack and talk about things, about the ideas of Mises and many of his students who are written on these subjects. So hopefully what I'll have to say will compliment their works and their talks. They've given it previous Mises universities. And if this is something that interests you, I really highly commend their, both their writings and their lectures to you because they're really fascinating and wonderful. In any case, I'm sticking mainly to the economics though and so I'm not gonna talk about some of the themes that others have focused on in the past, things like the relationship of war with civil liberties. This is obviously a very important topic, but it's outside the scope of what I'm gonna be discussing here. So I wanna begin by saying a little something about how this topic fits within this broader framework of Austrian economics. And to do that, I wanna draw your attention to this comment from Mises. This is from Human Action, but you can find many similar comments throughout his works. And Mises says that economics, at least until now, has been the best developed branch of praxeology, right? So you're familiar through your readings and through earlier lectures in this week with the idea of praxeology and with this Austrian interest in putting action at the center of economics and of social science. But when Mises puts it like this, he's raising a very, I think, an interesting question which is okay, so sure, economics is the best developed branch of praxeology, but what are the other branches, right? What do those look like exactly? What goes into them, right? Sometimes people use economics and praxeology sort of interchangeably, but they're not interchangeable, right? Economics is just one part of this broader method of approaching social science questions, right? So what else might be included within this broad framework? And here's one suggested schema from an old Rothbard article in the American Economic Review. And right away, you can see that from some of these things that what Mises says is correct, it does seem like this part B, the economic part, the specifically economic part of praxeology, this is the most, the best developed, right? It has the most sort of fields and subfields and we have a good idea of what goes in there. But then there are also some of these other categories that Rothbard suggests, including the theory of war, the theory of hostile action. So in addition to being a part of economic analysis, applied economic analysis, the study of war is also an independent type of investigation that we can do by thinking through the implications of action and social cooperation and conflict and so on, right? Note that for Mises's main interest was in the first type of studying war. If you look at human action, for instance, Mises has a chapter on the economics of war and that is in the last part of the book, the part that deals with interventionism, right? The hampered market economy, right? And of course you can see why that would be, you know, why this sort of large scale violence that's usually prosecuted by states, why, how that would relate to more conventional economic interventionism, right? So in any case, there are at least two ways that you can think about how warfare fits within a broader framework of Austrian economics and I'm gonna hope to draw on a little bit of both of those as we go through this. So the first big question is what is war? How do we define it from an economic perspective? And war is not, unlike some other concepts, it's not a narrow, praxeological concept. It's the idea of war isn't written into the idea of action, right? Instead it's something more anthropological or historical that is we observe these types of conflicts in the real world and we try to categorize them, you know, come up with common characteristics that we could use to identify them and that's how we get our sort of broad historical understanding of what warfare is and that's where we're gonna be, where I'm gonna be starting today. And in this view, we could come up with at least three important characteristics of warfare in the modern era. First, war is purposeful, right? This is why it fits within a framework of action, by the way, because that's what action is, it's purposeful behavior. But it's important to recognize a purpose behind war because historically many wars were treated as inevitable or as somehow outside the realm of human choice, right? Sometimes this was for devious purposes, other times it was simply mistaken ideologies, right? For instance, an ideology of class conflict that asserts that modern wars are just the logic of the capitalist system or of imperialism playing themselves out and therefore are to some extent inevitable and can't really be controlled. These would deny the purposeful element in war making, right? And these provide one good reason why we need to take note of this. Second, warfare is organized, right? Wars take place over a period of time, sometimes many, many years, and they require an enormous amount of resources in order to prosecute, right? And what this means is that there has to be some kind of organizing agency that's responsible for planning and allocating the use of scarce resources, right? This, by the way, is gonna hint a little bit at some socialist calculation problem, which maybe I'll mention a little bit more in a minute. But the basic point is that somebody needs to be doing the wartime planning, right? However troublesome or inefficient or irrational it might be, somebody is going to have to be doing this, right? And that hints then at the third characteristic of modern warfare, which is that it involves at least one state. Now, an important point to make is that warfare is not unique to states, right? It existed long before states did, and presumably will exist in some form long after the last state becomes dust, right? So it's not going away anytime soon, but nevertheless, states do have a very sort of special relationship with warfare, right? And the reason is that this purpose and this massive organization and allocation of resources, human and physical, this requires something like a state, right? It requires an extremely powerful agency to do all this organizing and planning, usually without the permission of many of the people who are being planned and organized, right? So it's very difficult to get anything like this, especially on a large scale going, without some kind of agency that looks something like a modern state, right? And if you look at works in sociology and works on sort of the origin of the modern states, you can see this special relationship between states and warm making, you know, you have sociologists like Charles Tilly, for example, who argue that warfare is actually the reason for the creation of the modern state, because for millennia, practically, rulers have been looking for ways to finance these extraordinarily expensive military adventures, and it is very difficult to do that unless you have, for instance, a strong, dependable tax base, right? So people like Tilly argue that the modern state emerged as a way for rulers to finance military expenditures, right? By creating this geographical political area that they could then systematically tax over time and develop a more consistent stream of revenue, okay? Carvan Klauswitz, who is a name that you might be familiar with, famously said that war is the continuation of politics by other means, and that's what he's kind of getting at with this. Again, this sort of special relationship between states and warm making. Again, this has been known since ancient times. In fact, some of the ancients put it even better. I think this sums it up really nicely. War's the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the doubt of survival or extinction, right? This is the logic of states and warfare, right? Warfare is always the last resort of any state when it comes either to defense or for the expansion of its own political power, right? So moving on to talking about the economic causes of war. Of course, each individual historical war has its own particular causes, right? But we can create some groupings and some classifications in different types of cause of war, and among these are economic ones, right? And so, of course, naturally this is the type that people like Mises tended to focus most on. And for Mises, when thinking about the cause of international conflict, the basic question was economic, and it was ideological, right? Economically speaking, the major choice that states are always having to make is between what Mises called autarky or the international division of labor, right? Autarky is economic self-sufficiency. It is, in a sense, the policy of mercantilism, of economic nationalism, a policy of anti-free trade, essentially, right? And policies that are particularly opposed to the free movement of capital and labor, okay? So these types of policies and the ideologies behind them are for Mises not only deeply illiberal, but also opposed to economic common sense, right? Because autarky is a recipe, essentially, for poverty, whereas the international division of labor and embracing a global free market economy is the only reliable path to prosperity and also the only reliable path to peace, right? And I'm sure you can see how the logic of this plays out. When you have domestic protectionist policies that are designed to protect domestic producers at the expense of everyone else in the world, particularly foreign producers, it's only natural that this would create tensions and conflicts in the political realm that could grow and eventually boil over and become actual military conflicts, right? Protectionist policies promote the prosperity of a small number of privileged groups at home while directly damaging the prosperity of many other groups abroad, right? So for example, you can understand why if you were a poverty-stricken consumer in a foreign country unable to make a living because you can't sell your goods across borders, why that would gradually turn into, you know, a great deal of political dislike and eventually tension and outright military conflict, right? So for Mises, this is the central economic question, right? It's not a question of sort of broader class interests or something like that. It's really about economic privilege and the people who have it and the conflicts with the people who don't, right? This is a very nice quote from Mises on this topic when he says that economic nationalism and necessary complement of domestic interventionism hurts the interests of foreign peoples and thus creates international conflict. It does this through customs, migration barriers, foreign exchange controls, quantitative trade restrictions and expropriation of foreign investments, right? In other words, the myriad of different types of price and other economic controls that states have at their disposal, all of these go into creating a massive potential for global conflict, right? So this, for me, this is what's behind the economic causes of war. Now, once a war does break out, it sets in motion a chain of economic events that not only have a disastrous effect on the economy, but they create a whole range of problems that governments have to try to solve, right? About how they allocate resources and about how they continue the conflict and eventually try to win it, right? With win in quotation marks, right? So this gets us to the problem of war finance, right? And once again, as I said, this is an ancient problem. It goes back millennia. But essentially any government, whether in peacetime or wartime, has essentially three options for financing any particular venture, right? And those options are taxation, borrowing and inflation. And each of these plays an important part in the logic of war making and in the logic of war finance. And as you see, there's a sort of logic to the way that governments change their attitudes towards each of these methods as a conflict goes on. So typically, governments in peacetime and wartime start with taxation, right? Again, this is one of those fundamental characteristics of modern states. So it's no surprise that governments resort to them very quickly when they need some quick cash, right? And you will see, you know, if you look at wars in the last century or so, particularly major wars, when they break out, they are shortly followed by significant changes in taxes, right? Whether it's a question of who's being taxed or a question of increasing particular tax rates, governments use both, right? The trouble with taxation that governments always face is that it is extremely unpopular, right? Despite all the, you know, the jingoistic patriotic rhetoric that you might hear around the outbreak of wars, once people actually have to start paying money themselves, they get a lot more skeptical about the value of the war effort, right? The reason for this is simple, right? People, other things equal, prefer to keep their money, right? And people notice very quickly once their tax rates increase, right? Once you, you know, it's very easy to see if your income tax rates suddenly double, that you have less cash in your pocket to spend, right? And as a result, your standards of living are going to fall, right? So taxation tends to be quite unpopular. So even though governments resort to it very quickly and sometimes even invoke extreme increases in taxation during wartime, there are some pretty hard limits to what any particular population is going to accept in terms of taxation, right? So this is a big problem that governments are always facing, right? By the way, just as a side note, I don't know if you know this, but this is where either withholding tax was introduced in 1943 in the middle of World War II. Governments needed to get around this taxation problem and they had sort of tried out the withholding tax in some earlier context, but it wasn't very widely used. But then in World War II, they needed to find a way to increase tax rates, but they needed to get past this problem that people, you know, at that time were mainly paying their taxes in like little installments throughout the year. So when the tax bill came due, like any other bill, you had to have actually saved the money and you had to be prepared to fork it over, right? So that's what people were used to. And to get around that and around the very obvious increases in taxation, the withholding tax was introduced because once tax withholding happens, you never get the money to begin with, right? It's deducted from your paycheck before you ever see it. And so it sort of feels like it's not really your money and that you never really owned it. So you don't feel the loss of it as much, right? And that actually has a profound psychological effect because it means that people are willing to accept much higher tax rates than they normally would if you first handed them a pile of cash and then said, oh yeah, by the way, now I'm gonna take 50% of it back or whatever, right? Another important implication of that is that you'll notice that the withholding tax did not go away after the war was ended, right? You know, it's still with us today and in fact is still used in most developed countries in some form or other, right? This gets at what's sometimes called the ratchet effect of government intervention, which I'll talk about more as we go, right? Anyway, eventually taxation just isn't enough so governments need to find another way to finance the war, right? So very quickly they turn to borrowing and borrowing can be a very effective method for raising finance. In the Second World War, I think the United States raised something like $185 billion just from the sale of war bonds, mainly to the American general public. They were the people who were most buying them. So we're not talking trivial sums here, right? There's a lot of money in this. But of course borrowing has its limitations as well, right? You can only sell so many war bonds to people and war creates some particular circumstances that can make borrowing difficult, right? You know, you can become a bad credit risk very easily if the war isn't going your way or if the major centers of finance are geographically separated from you or if they're on the other side of the war, right? There are all kinds of different reasons why borrowing can become very difficult war time, right? And sometimes, you know, borrowing even continues long after countries are really viable credit risks anymore, right? If you think about in the First World War, which essentially bankrupted Great Britain in both world wars actually, the United States was a major lender to all of its allies and really helped keep them going and keep them in both of those wars, right? Even though they really knew that there wasn't a way for their allies to pay them back after the war was over. And that's one reason why very shortly, especially after the First World War, thoughts began to shift very quickly toward a restitution that could be gained from the opposing powers, right? One of the more interesting anecdotes about borrowing is a method of war finance that I've recently discovered. Because it's the centenary of the First World War right now, there's a lot of new research going on about it, including some really fascinating stuff coming out of the Bank of England about how Great Britain financed its entry into the First World War. And in particular, some of the researchers at the Bank of England have covered this very interesting story about a rather extraordinary deception that the British government and the Bank of England engaged in in order to keep their initial war effort going. So in 1914, as the sort of autumn and the winter begin to arrive, people start to realize that this war is not gonna be over in a couple of months like we thought, it's gonna drag out. So the British government set out on this campaign to raise an extraordinary amount of money through the sale of war bonds, about 350 million pounds worth in 1914 pounds. So an extraordinary amount of money. And the plan was for the British banks to pick up some of those bonds, sort of enough to get the ball rolling. And then the vast majority of the bond sales would be to the British general public, right? And they assumed that of course, people are very nationalistic and patriotic, so of course they're gonna pick up the tab for all of this. But the plan ended up being kind of a disaster, right? Because basically nobody bought the war bonds. There was very little interest in this among the general public. And what interest there was tended to come from things like groups like shipping companies who were suddenly booming because they were involved in the war industries, right? But the private interest that the government had hoped to provoke never really materialized, right? So they had this huge problem, right? They were sort of poised for disaster because they hadn't been able to sell all of these bonds and get the revenue from that. Not only would it have hampered the war effort, but it would have driven the prices of the outstanding bonds down because people would see there was no interest in them. It would have made them more difficult to raise money in the future. And just in general, it would have been a PR disaster, right? Because then the Germans would have been able to say, look, England, you might as well just quit now. It's obvious that your heart's not in it. You can't, you don't even wanna finance the war. So just step out and make a separate piece or something like that, right? So the government was poised for disaster and thus also the war effort. And so the Bank of England came up with this scheme to make it all work. So what they did was they essentially took a massive amount of their own money, a couple hundred million pounds worth, and they advanced it to two or three of the executives of the Bank of England, right? And then those executives went out and bought all of the war bonds in their own names, right? As private individuals, right? And in their own names so that nobody would know that they were actually being effectively bought by the bank, right? So they did this and then the bank just held the bonds on its own balance sheet, right, as its assets, but they didn't put them under the usual category of government bonds, right? Because again, people would have got wise. So they just put them over on some sort of like miscellaneous assets, you know, which suddenly increased by a couple of hundred million pounds, but nobody noticed, right? And then the British government was able to say, look at the extraordinary success of this bond sale. This is why, you know, like clearly everybody wants to be involved in this fight, right? So it ended up working out very well for them. Keynes, who was working in the Bank of England and you won't be surprised to learn was one of the people who was sort of in the know about this. He called this a masterly manipulation of public policy and public opinion, right? So anyway, I just found that story to be quite interesting. In any case, borrowing has its limitations. You can only do it for so long, right? So that gets us to the third factor in war finance, which is inflation. And I will come back and talk about this more specifically because it's sort of a topic in its own right. But again, as you can see in peacetime as in wartime, inflation is a very easy choice for governments, right? It seems like it's costless. Yes, people are sort of aware that over the long term, prices might rise and you might have some bad effects. But for politicians who are ramping up a war effort, these concerns seem to be very, very distant, right? It seems, this is something that somebody years down the road, they can worry about that. So governments very easily resort to inflation and there are many, many cases of this. The famous one I think that's in all the money in banking textbooks, the Continentals, right? The paper money issued during the American Revolution to try and finance that, right? It was very quickly inflated and became worthless. And there are many more cases that you can point to throughout history. So inflation, it seems like a really good idea at the time but it has these short and long term effects that can actually end up being kind of disastrous. In any case, none of these methods is really workable or is really a stable method for governments to finance a large scale war over a large period of time, right? They all have their limitations and so in wartime governments tend to be involved in this complicated dance where they're constantly trying to figure out which method they should lean on most right now, which is the least likely to lead to a collapse of the war effort because that is what happens if you try to lean on any one of these too much, right? And so governments are constantly shifting back and forth between emphasis on different one method and usually using some form of them all at the same time. So once governments figure out a way to finance the war, once the war actually gets going, they need to mobilize, right? Suddenly governments are in desperate need of a massive amount of physical and human resources that they can pour into the war effort, right? Troops need to be outfitted, armies need to be put into the field or whatever variation of that technologically, drone fleets need to be assembled or whatever people use these days. Defenses need to be strengthened, but the point is a massive infrastructure needs to be in place for a war effort to really get off the ground, okay? And because of this, it's the whole process of war planning is this big logistical nightmare, right? And it's a problem that is very much subject to the socialist calculation problem. As you probably know or you've figured out, the economic calculation problem isn't just about socialism, right? It's about any kind of resource allocation that occurs without access to a system of market prices, right? And so it's a very much a problem of ordinary public policy as well, including military operations, right? For which there aren't market, true market prices for any of the goods that are involved in these sorts of military operations, right? So that's a sort of background of this, but one of the distinctly Austrian ways that you can look at the way that wars operate is by looking at capital and by looking at the idea of the structure of production, that Austrians have been so interested in, right? This sort of delicate interweaving of all these heterogeneous capital goods that make up the whole structure of the economy, right? You won't be surprised to learn that war has some pretty profound effects on the structure of production, and it distorts it, even in some cases, destroys it in several different ways, okay? So in general, you could say that war is basically a massive diversion of resources away from the paths that they would have taken in peacetime, right? I mean, that's sort of definitionally true of warfare, but you can look at its effect on the structure of production in at least a couple of different ways. I'll call these a horizontal way, and a vertical way, right? So the first effect is horizontal, and this is a shift between different stages of production, right? So as soon as war breaks out, suddenly government needs a massive amount of war goods, right? You know, guns and ammunition and tanks and the various other goods that go into making up a war, right? So these need to be produced, but most economies aren't usually producing massive amounts of these goods, and that means the production has to be shifted, right? And it has to be shifted from ordinary consumer goods production into war industries, right? So this is a horizontal shift, right? The capital, the labor that usually produced just ordinary consumer products and consumer services suddenly shift over, right? The consumer production decreases or is totally eliminated, and everything gets pushed into war production, right? Again, you know, the sort of ordinary products of war, right? Guns and ammunition and the massive infrastructure and physical supplies and labor and so forth that militaries need to operate, right? So this priority of war over consumer production, the immediate effect of it is that living standards are going to fall, right? There are going to be shortages of consumer goods, and you know, all those things that make up sort of quality of life, right? So living standards are immediately going to fall for people, and this is going to happen over time as well, right? Because existing stocks of consumer goods will be shifted over to military use, and the production of future consumer goods is also going to decrease, right? So if you think about this in the case of the US during World War II, you had a massive, massive decrease in the productions of all things consumer, right? You know, a company like GM, for instance, completely stopped the production of civilian cars during the Second World War and only produced military vehicles, right? It only took a few months after Pearl Harbor, actually, for the entire civilian auto industry in the United States to essentially disappear and become just one massive war industry. By the time, by the end of the war, there was one Chevy factory that was producing all replacement cars for all automobiles in the United States, right? So that's one good. In 1942, the sale of vehicles to non-military personnel was actually outlawed completely, right? And it became illegal to store new cars outside, right? So you couldn't put your existing stock of cars outside, like in advertisement, you had to store them inside so that people wouldn't be buying them, right? So it wouldn't be invoking too much consumer demand, right? So this is the first very important effect that war has on the structure of production. This very simple switch from producing for consumers to producing for the war effort, right? And this one's a little simpler to see. But there's a more difficult, more sort of complicated, unseen to use Bastiat's word effect on the structure of production as well. And this is when production shifts from what we call the higher stages of production to the lower stages, right? So if you think about Menger's model of the structure of production where you have the lower stages, which are producing small scale capital goods and consumer goods, and then you have the higher stages, which are the really advanced capital goods and factors of production. The outbreak of war is gonna tend to shift the structure of production down toward those lower stages, right? Again, the reason for this is that war requires resources right now, right? Mises has a great line where he says war can't be waged with future goods, right? It has to be waged with present goods, right? So you need the guns and the ammunition and the tanks and the planes and all of this. You need it right now, right? Because it's not gonna do you any good in the future, right? So because of this, the entire economy becomes more sort of present oriented, right? And you have these very high stages, capital goods and the higher stages of production, goods that are producing complex mining equipment and very advanced plants and factories, very specialized goods. These aren't useful for the war effort, right? They can't be converted into assembly lines for ammunition and small arms and things like that. So they're either abandoned or they're simply just not replaced when eventually they wear out, right? They don't support the war effort so they're given a lot less focus, right? Instead, in those lower stages, every capital good that can be converted to war production is, right? Because you're gonna have, in the lower stages especially, goods that are a little bit more convertible, right? So you have the car factories and the aircraft factories that simply switch from civilian to military production, right? There's a cost associated with that, but it's smaller, right? And the conversion can be done, right? So everyone starts shifting towards these lower stages because that's where the resources are that are needed to keep the military effort going. The punchline of all this is capital consumption, right? So hopefully throughout this week you've already learned a little bit about how delicate the structure of production is and just how vital it is that human beings build capital and build a consistent, coordinated structure of production over time. That is the basis of prosperity, right? That is the explanation of how essentially development can happen and living standards can arise. So when you play with that and when you physically destroy it through the destruction of war and also destroy it economically by destroying the incentives for entrepreneurs to save and invest and build capital and giving a certain group of privileged producers the incentive to just massively increase their business by bidding for war contracts and things like that, the result is that the capital that ordinary people need in order to maintain the living standards this is going to be consumed, the living standards are going to fall, right? So it produces a war mobilization, produces a kind of crisis in the economy, if you will. That's not all that different from what you might see for instance in a business cycle, right? This is a different kind of example I wanted to give. Does anybody know who this is? No? It's Wilfred Owen. Well, it says it at the bottom I guess, so.  Owen is probably the most famous of the English war poets of the First World War and he has a very nice example. I take this from one of the stanzas of one of his poems. When he talks about the promise of cheap homes for everybody that we're going to get after the war is over but we can't build those right now, we don't need homes, we need aerodromes right now. And he's actually without knowing it talking about exactly the structure of production issue, right? The entire change of the economy to a war footing, right? The elimination of consumer goods, consumer durables, the shift of capital to produce these resources that are really only good for the war effort. So I happen to like this quite a bit. Again, here's another more ancient example of the same sort of thing. Punchline is that no country has ever profited from protracted warfare, right? So we've known this for millennia now. We just needed modern economics to come along and tell us why warfare is actually really a good thing. You just didn't realize it this whole time, right? Okay. In any case, so if the economic outlook of war is so bad, right? If it does produce a kind of crisis, how is it possible that wars ever happen let alone are carried on over a long period of time? How is it possible that anybody could stand for this? And the answer tends to focus on monetary inflation, right? I mentioned that I would come back to this before because it really is a sort of a topic in its own, right? Inflation is a time-tested method for not only continuing and supplying a war effort, but also for concealing its true costs from consumers. And this is the key element, right? Because people don't stand for this. As I said, no matter what your nominal ideology once you have to start paying the human and the monetary cost of a war, people's support for it tends to decrease quite quickly, right? So one effective way that you can conceal the costs of war is through various forms of monetary expansion, right? And in fact, if you expand the money supply, as countries very often do, right from the beginning of wars, you can not only preserve the illusion of prosperity, but you can actually make it seem as if the country is booming, right? This is one of the great myths, the myth of wartime prosperity. It's especially prevalent about the US during World War II. This is something, again, I'll reference Bob Higgs' work because he is the single economist who was the most to just completely demolish this myth that the US was really prosperous because of its entry into World War II and that World War II got America out of the depression and things like that. So it's simply not true. But monetary expansion is one reason why people have these wrong ideas about supposed wartime prosperity, right? I'll say also historically, one of the very first things governments do when war is declared is go off the gold standard, right? In the First World War, all the major belligerents did this immediately upon the outbreak of the war because they realized that, you know, without even the presence of, say, a gold standard or some other limit on the money monopoly, without that limit, or with that limit in place, it's very, very difficult to expand the money supply to the extent that governments need in order to finance their wars, right? So gold standard or monetary checks tend to be abolished right away as soon as the war breaks out. And then there are a couple of other ways that this monetary expansion has deleterious effects on the economy. The first, of course, is that they increase nominal prices and wages in the war goods industries. They tend to be the first receivers of new money. So they benefit from this simply because they have new demand for their products, right? So the merchants of death do really well from the outbreak of war. But there's also the more subtle Austrian-flavored part of the monetary expansion. And that is the Kantian effects, right? Because the issuing of new money also creates wealth redistribution, right? In this case, it's to the war goods industries, right? You know, the Lockheed Martins and so on of the world. And away from essentially consumers in the economy, right? People in other industries. And the further away your business is from the war industries, the worse the wealth redistribution is going to be for you, right? However, from an aggregate perspective, it can look like the economy is actually booming, right? Because many prices are rising. You know, businesses are gonna, especially in the war goods industries, they're going to be expanding, looking very, very prosperous. And as a general inflationary effect, even while the Kantian effects process is working out, there's still gonna be price rises in other areas of the economy as well. The stock market very often booms in response to these huge war goods orders and things like that. So again, it can all look on the surface like it's really good. But what's going on beneath the surface is of course there was just a monetary expansion, right? The real resources in the economy haven't changed. And in fact, they're actively being destroyed, right? As the capital structure is being eroded and being shifted into production of war goods that don't actually help consumers. Consumer goods themselves are being destroyed and their production is being severely curtailed and so on. So what's really going on is that real incomes, standards of living, and so on are falling. But the nominal picture, the superficial picture of the economy is it is actually doing pretty well. And this by the way is just one more reason why it's so vital to talk about all of the costs of war, right? Because at this point, I think people are pretty familiar with the human costs of war, right? We know about the loss of life and the loss of welfare from the direct destruction. But what we don't see, again, in St. Bastiat's Unseen, are some of these less obvious economic implications of how these wars are carried on, right? Once more, here's Mises. One can say without exaggeration that inflation is an indispensable means of militarism without the repercussions of war on welfare become obvious much more quickly and penetratingly. War weariness would set in much earlier. Okay. However, the negative effects of war on the economy don't just stop with some of these core issues. There's the broader implications as well, right? Again, as I was saying, Mises always stressing this fundamental choice that governments make, right? Is it protectionism? Is it economic nationalism and so forth? Or are you gonna pursue a policy of laissez-faire, right? And inevitably, if you choose the protectionist policy, policies of price controls, wartime controls over the economy, it sets in motion this other economic logic that Mises also analyzed, whereby government controls tend to accumulate over time. So if you know Mises' short essay, The Middle of the Road Policy Leads to Socialism, one of the examples that he gives in this essay are wartime economies, right? Which start out by trying to control just a few prices here or a few businesses there just to support the war effort. But then they rapidly run into shortages and all kinds of other economic problems. And so governments are faced with this constant choice, right? Do we try to, do we just take a step back, abolish the controls and move back toward freer markets? Or do we add controls to try and mitigate the effects of the first controls that we put on, right? And unfortunately, you'll be shocked to learn, governments tend to want to add on price controls, right? So control over the economy has this sort of cumulative effect, whereby over the course of the war, the problems get worse and worse, so governments are constantly struggling to find new controls, new regulations, new prohibitions, that they can put on consumer goods and on consumer-oriented production in order to support the war effort. And the result, what you get, is what's sometimes called war socialism, right? The wartime, the true war economy, whereby all production essentially you have a de facto system of central planning that exists with all production being directed toward the war effort, right? So this is actually what happened in all the major belligerent countries in both of the world wars, right? Even the ones that started out relatively free ended up with extensive systems of central planning by the time the conflicts came to an end, okay? What's interesting about war socialism is that usually the system of private property, free exchange, free contracting and so forth that existed in these countries before the war, nominally, all of that stays in place, right? There isn't a revolution, there isn't a new constitution written and a new era declared. Instead, this happens small, it happens a piecemeal, right? A little bit over time, it's cumulative and typically even though by the end of the war there's a de facto centralized control over the economy, nominally, all of these property rights and private enterprise and so forth tend to remain in place, right? And this is what Mises called socialism of the German pattern, right? De facto socialism, but with a sort of a nominal adherence to free markets, right? I also mentioned the ratchet effect. Again, this is something that Bob Higgs has written quite a bit about. I'm about this cumulative process of the buildup of government power and government control over the economy. The idea is that like a ratchet, wartime provides, gives governments a great excuse to increase its control over the economy and so governments take on massive war-planning powers and so forth. After the conflict is over, some of those powers get returned, right? And are abolished, but not all of them. There's always something that remains. So over time, government's control over the economy tends to increase, right? It has these huge upsurges and then it goes back down, but not quite to where it was before and then it goes up again and so forth. So the general trend over time is for government to become more and more involved in the economy, right? Again, Mises just puts it best, in the long run, war and the preservation of the market economy are incompatible, right? There is no way to preserve for any significant period of time these two demands, right? On the one hand, consumers for high standards of living and on the other hand, governments for war production for the military effort. Okay, so if we can say something a little bit about how wars, how they start, how they're prosecuted and so forth, what can we say about the end of war and what we could possibly do to sort of prevent wars in the future, right? So if we think back to one of the first things I said, which is the idea of purpose behind war, right? Mises put it pretty plainly, I think. He said, look, if war is purposeful, we know that there are war makers out there, right? If we wanna stop war, what we really need to do is eliminate the conditions that make war possible, right? We need to eliminate those motivations and those purposes that the war makers have. If we can do that, then we have a serious chance at peace in the long run. And for Mises, again, it's about ideology, it's about institutions, it's about embracing liberalism, the time-honored principles of laissez-faire and laissez-passe that allow for global peace, global economic cooperation, right? That's the key behind this entire thing. And as he said, the main thing to do is to discard the ideology that generates war, right? Ideologies of conflict, right? Whether it's classical Marxist class analysis or nationalist ideologies, racist ideologies, all of these different types of ideological views that hold conflict to be at the center of their analysis, right? Inevitable conflicts between human groups. The only thing we can do to prevent war really in the long run is to discard these ideologies and embrace a more thoroughgoing liberalism and a more philosophy of peace and of social cooperation and hopefully of prosperity because prosperity is the last thing that war ever actually creates. So, I think I'm out of time. So, thank you for your attention. Thank you.


I'm a sports psychologist who worked for the US Olympic Committee and one of the things that I was talking about here is that one slice of that work which is not the performance side so much as the mental health side and one of the things I was talking about is just the sudden rapid increase in awareness about mental health issues and seeming increase in mental illness rates in young adults and athletes and in the general population. You know there's lots of fascinating interactions between sport and mental health where on one hand sport has been shown and exercise has been shown to really improve mental health. At the same time if an athlete is under recovered you know what we used to call overtraining but now we call under recovery they're not adapting well to the training they're doing that can actually contribute to fatigue, can it contribute to feelings of feeling down it fits a lot of the same criteria as you would for someone who's depressed. It's a mind-body interaction we're not sure exactly where one starts and one stops but we do know that there is an interaction. It's my first time at this conference and I definitely want to return there's a ton of interesting data on injury prevention of injury lots of fascinating speakers from around the world and some really cutting-edge stuff.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. I am the founder, but today I dedicate myself, especially, to the training, to the training of popular education. And I am working at a national center of ideological political training. In Haiti, we are in an almost insurrectionary situation. And that, from the arrival of the government of Jovenel Moïse, the people were almost always on the street, first with the first budget that this government made, it was a budget where the government was taking resources from the poor to feed a small group of the bourgeoisie. And the people said it was a criminal budget. So the peasant organizations of workers were on the streets, and then it was discovered that the president is a person that nobody knew before, but to be presented as a candidate appeared many doses of corruption. And we have discovered that he is part of a mafia with the president Matély and he is a product of this mafia with the national oligarchy and that he is promoting neoliberal projects in favor of the North American multinationals. And very early on we said that this government is not ours, it is a government of imperialism and of the national bourgeoisie. But last year, the president made the decision to raise the price of fuel, of more than 50%. With that, there was a mobilization two days at the national level and the government was in the need to withdraw the decision. But from this time on, there is an almost permanent mobilization because with a lot of information about the corruption of this government, a parliament to the service of the National Palace and investigations on corruption on the Petrocaribe fund, which is a fund of 4.2 billion dollars that the people have to pay. It is a long-term loan. In my view, the loan is more advantageous than the country knew because this loan from Venezuela would allow the country to resolve problems of infrastructures, of energy, of the roads, of the protection of the environment, a lot of things. The government of Matelí and the government of the government of Matelí because he took out money from the State organizations to organize his project of production of money to export to Germany, which was an agricultural zone but it was a false project that received a lot of money from the State. So, every day there was more information and the people are asking for the restitution of these Petrocaribe funds and little by little after the suspension of this Petrocaribe project the government that was buying and selling fuel had to go through this program to the private sector but how the government could not raise the prices of fuels so they had to subsidize these products and the private sector that was buying and selling the fuels the government reached a debt of more than 8,000 million dollars and with that the private sector suspended the import of fuels and with that at the beginning of September the drivers of motorcycles started a mobilization and with the economic situation of misery, of unemployment, what there is in the country then the people joined the driver's mobilization and since more than a month in Haiti there is a permanent mobilization every day more acute against the government, against the parliament the people are asking for the change of the system and we have to start with the resignation of President Jovenel here we are and on the streets we can say that this is all the people all the sectors of national life the masses of the popular neighborhoods, especially but also students, students, union organizations of young women, peasant organizations, teachers and that is a total rebellion not only with this government especially the president but also the parliament and the whole system then everyone speaks that the system has to end but the system means something different maybe for each sector but everyone is living the end of the system then with this situation of mobilization there is a reflection of the government the government is using the police to kill the mobilization and the people respond for what they call violence but they are acts of defense of the people because it is very easy to criminalize the popular mobilization then with this situation the country is blocked and all the sectors are taking the word against the situation and asking for the resignation of the president now he almost doesn't have support of any sector only a small fraction of the oligarchy and of North American imperialism so now in this big opposition that exists there are Poles because there is a sector called democratic and popular where there is a mix of politics of social organizations and people of the bourgeoisie too and there is another pole with the left parties with the social organizations progresists, revolutionaries and some parties of what is called the democratic center of social democracy then and the whole world agrees that this government and parliament have to go and start a transition process and there are many common points in the proposals for the transition like a three-year transition to organize a national conference and come to a new constitution a plan of development for 25 years but the difference is the addition of each sector of this transition because there are sectors that want to be appropriated of this transition for their project but the people are living a total break with the system so there are other sectors that think that this transition has to be the last that's why we have to organize it well to have a government with honest people and to defend national interests and the transition has to be used for a political group that wants to continue the same and the battle is there so the whole world is on the street but it has different interests and here we are and at the level of... because we have organized the patriotic forum in the seat of the Campesino de Papaya Movement so it is also the seat of the School of Political Education and of the popular organizations of the Social Movement in general and the idea was to join different sectors but to reach a national understanding about the crisis we still know that there are different sectors with different interests but to reach a tactical alliance to get out of the crisis but the Poles came out and the Poles of the groups that want to use the power of the transition for them and the Pope's forum that wants a real transition so there is a shock but for the people the people are on the street for the change so now we must arrive as soon as possible to an agreement for a equitable transition and that is where we are today and the mobilization will continue but the leaders become as soon as possible to meet around a table and decide on the transition but for the youth I think there will be no possibility of how the international is living and their desire to make a negotiation is no longer possible so the fall of the youth is very safe it is a matter of date To sing that we are going to triumph advance the flag of unity and you will come, leaving me together and so you will see you sing and your flag will bloom


A sorcerer watched with jealous eyes as Peter and John laid hands to impart the Holy Spirit upon believers. Simon the Sorcerer was likely celebrated and perceived as important because of his sorcerous ways. And when he saw true power, he was threatened. He confused ministry for magic, servanthood for status. Because he offered to buy the Holy Spirit's power, he was harshly rebuked by the righteously indignant apostle Peter. Like Simon the Sorcerer, some might view God's power as a means of making themselves important. So let's remember that the purpose of power is the proclamation of the gospel and the glorification of Jesus.


Okay, you were live, Alfonso, if you'd like to start. Okay. Welcome, everyone. We're so excited to be here to talk about the project about Hyperledger and in collaboration with GBBC's Token Taxonomy Framework. We're going to talk today about a really exciting implementation of our Token Taxonomy Framework in the area of education, which Alfonso and Piage will tell us about that they worked so diligently on the concept of learning tokens. Thank you for having us today. I'm Diana. I'm the head of research and sustainability at GBBC. And why don't we introduce ourselves? So Alfonso, I'll take it to you to introduce yourself. Hi. I'm Alfonso, Alfonso Govela from Hyperledger Latin America regional chapter and also a mentor, Linux Foundation mentor, and very happy to have been the mentor of Piage as friends call, Tanjian Alam, who was the mentee. I'll give you, you can introduce yourself Piage. Hello, everyone. Myself, I'm Tanjian Alam. I'm the mentor of the Learning Token Hyperledger episode 2023. Yeah. And welcome all of you. Jackson. Yes, my name is Jackson Ross. I'm the technical program lead for GBBC. I work closely with Diana and have worked with Alfonso on several projects in the past through GBBC. So happy to be here to talk about this collaboration. Please, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to type them in our chat and we will get to them at the end of the presentation. But for now, let's get started with Alfonso telling us about the project. Good. Well, this is the Hyperledger mentorship project 2023 called Learning Tokens and Hyperledger Bessu. This is our first third public session. We'll give you the links for the other two. This is the final presentation of the work we've done now. And it's a joint project of Hyperledger Foundation and GBBC, which is also a member of Hyperledger Foundation. Learning is a lifelong year. We all know that. And our skills are our wealth. Skills are thought and learned through the transmission of knowledge. So what learning tokens are. They are the representation of the value of the transmission of knowledge. Tokens have been with us. It's not a new thing. They have been with us for 11 millennia. And they are the disasters of counting and writing. These are photographs of old tokens from Mesopotamia. In our case, an instructor teaches a skill to a learner. The skill is transmitted. The skill is acquired. The skill is assessed. The skill is confirmed. And then the instructor recognizes a unit of competence. This recognition is what the Learning Token is about. There are two ways to certificate acquisition of skills. Overall, as we call it, when you follow a whole process of lessons of assessment skills, evaluation, and at the end, you get a certificate. Or what we're proposing is a granular acquisition of skills. As a lesson is presented and these competence is recognized, and there is a scoring guide of which we give a Learning Token. In this way, each lesson and eventually the granularity could be anything. Anyone could be each question in a quiz. It's recognized so that we get a certificate, but also we have a skill wallet. And this is important. The skill wallet shows the profile of skills that any one of us have acquired over time. How do this happen? It happens within the same framework of self-sovereign identity verifiable credentials. There are institutions that grant learning tokens to learners that hold those tokens in a skill wallet. And they can use those tokens to prove their knowledge, to verifiers, which might be employer's partners. Or there's a special token that we can exchange in a marketplace that supports learning, collaborative learning. This is always regulated as it should be by the governance human part of authorities and participants in the program that define the governance framework and a trust registry. Learners register in institutions and courses. And institutions, instructors and courses and scoring guides are listed in a trust registry that also registers the tokens granted. This allows the verifiers and the marketplace to have a trust source of trust in the trust registry. So from Clay, we've got our little, little tokens. There were thousands of them in Mesopotamia. We have our four little tokens for attendance, a score for the learner as they learn, also a score for the instructors as they teach, and a health token that is distributed among learners to show their collaboration in a course or in some other fields. Jackson, this happens within the token taxonomy framework. I'll let you explain it. Yes, definitely. So just a little bit of context, I guess. GBBC, who I work for, is the largest industry association for blockchain and digital assets. We have over 500 members ranging from startups to large enterprises and academic institutions. And that comes into play because one of the initiatives of GBBC, which is called the Interwork Alliance, focuses on creating standards and guidance for specific tokenization use cases. The standards and guidance that we produce are intended to be platform neutral and simply serve as a way to describe tokens in a plain language that everyone can understand and provide guidance on how tokens should be implemented for specific use cases. And to kind of accomplish that on the right-hand side, you'll see the token taxonomy framework or the TTF. That's really the foundation of the standards and guidance that the Interwork Alliance works on. And it is a plain English framework way to describe tokens in a generic way that outlines kind of the basics of the token, what behaviors it is able to exhibit, is it able to be burned, minted, transferred, encumbered, as well as the data that it needs to contain to operate effectively within its specific use case. And so the output of the working groups within the Interwork Alliance is essentially a recipe or an outline for a token that any person looking to implement for that specific use case, they could take that to their technology provider and they could build them a token and a system that follows the kind of more generic guidance and with the goal of having interoperable systems where even if it's built on different technology, the data elements and how the token behaves can be consistent across platforms. And so that's how we got involved with this project. Alfonso reached out and wanted to use the TTF as a way to help define the learning tokens that they were building. And so we were happy to provide our guidance in that regard and to be involved with this very interesting and extremely relevant project. Thank you Alfonso. No, thanks to you. And so now we go to the real, real work that Piyash has done for six months and I want, before anything, I want to recognize this extraordinary work enthusiasm and he's been there 24-7 for six months and we'll hope to have him further ahead also. Piyash. Yeah, thank you Alfonso and thank you Jackson for the insight that you have shared about the token text in the framework. So since we have aimed to track the detail, the learning accomplishment of the learners and so as I was telling, since we are aimed to track the detail, learning accomplishment of the learners and from here we can came up with the idea of the learning token. For instance, the tokenomics sounds since familiar to every one of us. It's the combination of the word of the token and the economics while creating any sort of the cryptocurrency or any governmental token such as SEVEDC, we had to think how the minting, burning and the distribution will work. In our case, while we are designing our learning token, which is basically an enhancement in the learning system and it will create some proof of digital knowledge acquisition in form of digital token. So while designing it, we took the help of the token toxinomy framework. In short, token toxinomy framework break down the tokens into basic reusable parts and here from the picture we can see the template. So what it does, it defines the capabilities and the restriction of the tokens. In the picture we can see that token template has two parts, formula and the definition in terms of the formula, we have been introduced fungible and non-fungible token. In terms of the fungible token throughout the course, we have same type of token as the unit showed as collaborative helping before the learners. This is why we have introduced the fungible token. On the other hand, we have the non-fungible token. First say like a learner will get a unique attendance token for attending the class and this is why we have introduced non-fungible token as well. Next, the definition. Did I from the formula based on the fungibility and non-fungibility, we have attendance score and collective support. Finally, we have classes and instances. Classes represent the deployment token from the template and the instance stands for the single unit of the token. Next slide please. Here we can see the formula that we have created for two of our tokens. From the left table, we can see the base behavior and the property set. What is it? In terms of the token taxonomy framework, the concept of the base type behavior behavior group and the property states are the fundamental building block for defining the describing the tokens. Since the framework is enriched with lots of the predefined component, we had to choose that suit best for the learning token. From the table, we can see the property that we have chosen accordingly. So based on type, the type represents the core functionalities of the token. Behavior defines the specific action that can perform and next, the property states encapsulate the state of the properties that define the specific characteristics of the tokens. And finally, we have formula to formulate the formula from those properties states. And here I repeat to design the learning token. We have used the token taxonomy tools to generate the artifacts and formula that have been shown here showed here. The formula are not written by hands or generated manually. For those who are interested in a comprehensive description why and how we chose this property, I strongly suggest you to have a look in the token taxonomy framework. Probably we will have the reference at the end of the slide or we can also share it in the comments section as well. Can you go to the next slide please. Since you are looking forward to have a pilot and we are really happy to share that with the collaborative effort with the World Calisthenics Organization, we have done the pilot. What is World Calisthenics Organization? It is a global leader promoting calisthenics for the fitness and the well-being. They offer high quality education and the training program. Improving people of the any ages embarrassed the body weight exercise reach with this full potential. I would like to thanks them once again for their support throughout the entire pilot. All of them are present here. Can you go to the next slide please. Before I jump into the detail how we conducted the pilot, I would like to show how their platform works. So the World Calisthenics Organization offers several courses and we have chosen WCO Fundamental Lab & Work here. So here from the image one we can see we have several lessons under the course and in the picture two we can see each lesson consists of several quizzes and from image three we can see they keep the track of the login and for each student. From the image four we can see the result for each student and image five and six the progress log and result. So I hope it will help us to know how the educational organization work because we have run the pilot with them. Can you go to the next slide please. So this is the Registriper course. We can see we have institution registration data, instructor registration data and course registration data and scoring guide per course and learner registration data. In short I can say if anyone want to add up or integrate learning token into their platform this is what we are going to need to communicate with them to the ecosystem. We'll convert it into, we'll later on convert it into the SDK with the proper documentation in the near feature so that anyone can come up and read the documentation how to get started with learning token. Since in the learning token ecosystem we maintain a hierarchy where we have institution and under institution we have several instructor and under each instructor we have several courses where each courses will have formed with some learners. So with this data of World Calisthenic Organization we got registered and ran the pilot with them. Let's talk about the scoring guide per course table we can show here. So it basically says everything about a course because it will help anyone to find how many lessons are there within a course and what is the maximum amount of token that is allocated in the per course and the per lessons. So that anyone can easily find the comparison of grades that anyone have achieved. Can we go to the next slide? So our main focus to design the token and streamline the massive open course mobs and the small private open course using token token framework and implement the smart contract and deploy it within the hyperlase abyssal but to interact with it we need to have a graphical user interface and so from here we will discuss how we will start with the learning token and how the journey will look and how World Calisthenic Organization did it. Since we need to deploy the entire system into the cloud infrastructure during the execution of the pilot project we choose Polygon Testnet to deploy our smart contract and we use the AWS to deploy the front end and the back end. From here we can see International University of Business Arts and Technology is joining the platform as an institution and field all the required fields with the latitude and the longitude and the other required field that is required in the form and from the right side we can see the data we have stored on the blockchain during the pilot project that the World Calisthenic Organization did. Can you go to the next slide? This is the interface for instructor registration. So once when an instructor is going to register you will have to fill up the form. Let's say Alfonso is going to register into the platform since we are talking about the pilot project on the right side the data that we can see I pull the data from the Polygon Testnet or the World Calisthenic Organization instructor Sammy was registered during the pilot project. Can you go to the next slide please? Now this interface is for creating course as an instructor. Before creating each course we need course name. So we need to select while we are creating the course we need to select under which institution we are going to create the course and our smart contract is designing such a way that will only show those university that he belongs to. And next we will need two files. So this is the registration form for the learners. So from the left side we can see the interface that we have designed when any learner is trying to register in the our platform he has to fill all those images and register. On the right side we can see the data that was the person that registered during the pilot the Stella and the Andrea so they are the person who registered during the pilot. Can you go to the next slide? So finally from those two images we can see instructor is distributing the token by uploading a standard token template. So we have two types of tokens so from this interface the instructor will come here and select even to transfer token in a bulk or in a single. We have both options available here and after all the distribution of the token when the learners when the learner get logged in will have a skin like this below we have the skill wallet of learners or they will be able to see the learner achievement as the token associated with all the metadata that we can see here. Can you go to the next slide? Okay so what we have with Learning Tokens is the possibility of recognizing in a granular way each of the lessons each of the quizzes and we give through the scoring guide we give Learning Tokens for each of those issues as granular as any instructor would like to do and so if the course is completed and it's cost is paid and get a certificate but in a lot of places in the world sometimes certificates are expensive for many of us the recording stopped okay well I'll continue without the recording but if we have Learning Tokens we can have recognition of as much as we advanced even if we don't have the certificate we can have the skill wallet that covers up for all the real acquisition with the certificate or without the certificate and that's the power of this presentation that we're giving to you what would be the next steps after the mentorship program well there would be governance, technical and courses in terms of governance PIASH is uploading formulas definitions artifacts all the information that it is also in our links that we'll give afterwards to the TTF repository we are writing a joint report Hyperledger and GBBC and eventually we would like to have a working group that could evaluate the evolution of this Learning Tokens on the technical side what PIASH did has to evolve into an SDK so that any platform of any program anywhere in the world can connect automatically and ease the difficult and many times unpleasant task I know as a teacher we have to upgrade it and then another next step that we all take in parallel is we have to test it more beyond I appreciate what WCO did with us but I think we should start in-house with Hyperledger and with GBBC and some other courses and with that idea to Diana or Diana for the friends I know from Bolivia so I speak Spanish too I just want to put the answer back and explain we're very very excited about this collaboration and I want to give you an overview on the GBBC and some of our research initiatives we put together we provide our members like Hyperledger a number of in-depth reports and also we have a series of open source ideas which are shorter reports that are very specific to any use case and they cover blockchain use cases across industries across all industries essentially we are working with Alfonso and Hyperledger on a special report which will be coming to explain in further detail the concept of CTF as it may be applied for education and in particular the learning tokens it's really important to highlight the importance of standards because standards facilitate interoperability and interoperability facilitates collaboration and if we don't all work under some sort of agreement of the same rules implementations like this won't really take off but if we go to the next slide I want to mention in addition to our special reports and open source idea reports we also have an annual launch of a very comprehensive crowdsource initiative called the global standards mapping initiative where we cover key elements of different aspects of blockchain and digital assets you can see the statistics that span from regulation, taxonomy a compilation of different forms of technical standards, a mapping of the stakeholders in the space and a number of reports and visuals that cater to different sectors within those key findings if we go to the next slide one of our GSMI components is a mapping of courses that teach blockchain and digital assets and we have compiled close to 2,000 courses all over the world taught by universities and other credit institutions you can see the statistics they span across all academic fields mostly in the area of computer science and engineering they span all regions and they also span across graduate and professional courses and certificates the reason why I want to highlight our repository of courses is that the project of learning tokens may be of interest for universities like these and if anyone in the audience is interested in learning more about the project of learning tokens and exploring ways that it can reach implementation across different educational institutions please reach out to us and more to come but in our next iteration of GSMI which we update consistently every year we'll explore the possibility of learning tokens for educational institutions as something that we could support and implement but if you move to the next slide we'll conclude this presentation if you want to mention a little bit the resources that you've put together yes yes we would like to know what you think we would like to engage you all of you in a conversation and for that we have the repository of the mentorship hyperledger mentorship program which is called learning tokens and hyperledger BESU and that's at the wiki of hyperledger and that's one of the interns in the program the pilot is presented in also in an article in media and you can see the slides that we presented but then we also have a hyperledger lab hyperledger labs are special spaces for collaboration and we got fortunately one for learning tokens and this is the GitHub repository where you can have all the information not only about the project and the documents you can go to the readme but most important you can see all the formulas definitions, artifacts that P.H. has created together with Jackson from the token taxonomy framework and also the code the code is there in our GitHub repository and for all of you that might want to get engaged with the token taxonomy framework we're giving you also the AirWork Alliance DTF GitHub repository. What is this all about? I think that it's time to really recognize the importance of skill and this is not something that we are proposing many people are working on what it's called skill first initiative where employers, where partners many people evaluate skills in a granular way for jobs for businesses for what have you and I think that we are presenting an alternative of recognizing those initiatives of skill acquisition and giving every one of us a skill wallet a skill wallet that is our profile profile of skills that we hope for life and as we continue the journey of learning well we have a wallet to treasure all the recognitions of the skills that we have acquired so as a takeaway we can measure recognize and reward learning you're welcome to use it this is our contact slide and maybe we can go to the Q&As we've been short shorter than we thought so it give us a lot of time to engage in the conversation. I'm going to stop sharing the screen so that we can start with Q&A I'm going to say we've got a few folks with facts that they're interested in in learning tokens and if either of you want to raise your hands or expand on what you're working on or what angle you'd be approaching learning tokens from please shut up thank you so much for the opportunity to learn about what is happening here this is such an incredible initiative that I think Alfonso and Piach are spearheading that it really has been inspiring to be able to know that there is a standard that other projects can follow our software development agency has actually been trying to bring something of a learn to earn model when we came across what Piach and Alfonso were building we knew we had to fall in line how we can do our best to align and I'm grateful to be here there's a lot of information that I think has opened my eyes to how the framework for these different tokens and the taxonomy can really help us take things to the next level and I'd be really interested in learning more about that because it really does seem like a great way to bring corporate entities who are looking for services or talent together with talent who has been able to prove that they have a certain skill and so that's actually the concept that we've been working on and we left to see this moving forward in one way or another with everything that's going on here with the taxonomy framework so I really do appreciate the knowledge thank you Johnny not only for the question which is quite relevant but for all the support and all the faith in the project with the pilot thanks to you and your friend that is also here in the group now Sammy and Andrea it's not too late for him in Italy but maybe he's got some other thing and couldn't be with us but he'll see the recording so thank you Johnny thank you Johnny for believing in us and we look forward to to continue working with you and I thought that it was very good that one of the first well the first pilot was for something relating to our bodies and our health so if our bodies are in good shape we might have better chances to learn one thing I do know is that there is hi Alex I love that solution and I'm actually really happy you brought that up because that was the concept that I think we had originally began with because it is a very much a decentralized finance type of way of looking at it but this token taxonomy framework helped us realign with the true potential for corporate entities and being able to connect talent in this gig economy in a new way and that's why I'm so grateful to learn what we can do I know that the world calisthenics organization has a big goal of being able to help gyms all over the world be able to identify high quality professionals through this type of education process and certification and the granular education that you're bringing here and I think that that's going to be the key for these different gyms so that way they know who they're working with and I'm really grateful that you guys have expanded our perception of things and looking forward to seeing how hyper-legit-last can help move this initiative forward. Yes and thank you Alexander for your question in the chat I'll read it you ask do you see blockchain as a solution to collecting royalties on education and courses similar to what's being explored in music yes now that's a question that Johnny already answered and I thank you Alex for asking it it's a way to collect royalties but also it's a way to share to share health tokens okay and those health I mean learning tokens I'm reading Brendan's question at the same time and I'm on an old male hardware that is not good for multitasking you're young people or you can do it now but at our time the hardware was incomplete so our learning tokens could be a way of helping each other and that help could be exchange in the market that supports education and it could be a monetary support or it could be an income and that's where it relates exactly to what you're asking Brendan you I made a mistake because I was reading your comment in the chat and Brendan says health is wealth sweet equity every drop of sweat equals a deposit into your bank or personal health I think I would ruin it Brendan if I could touch on another item real quick that I actually know that has been really essential ever since we started talking about this entire aspect of education I happen to work with a company that is able or an organization I'm sorry that is able to provide what is called a green designation so that that way they can get better access to financial opportunities now the learning education comes in or the learning process comes in and the learning tokens initiative comes in which is from my understanding I think what you guys are establishing here is the ability for players to be able to leverage your SDK to connect their own platforms to be able to relay information back to this learning token initiative let's call it on hyper ledger right which would be the central repository where anybody can actually validate what would be somebody's perceived knowledge along the way is that correct? Piyash is saying yes with his head I saw it I saw that and it made me really happy to see that that's great to hear Piyash yeah actually this is what actually we are thinking in the long run so in the long run we will have a central repository where all the data will be there all the registry universities are there and all the courses are there and within the courses we have all the registry instructor so in a sense it will be it will be a a truth source where any other entities will come here and make the query to find like that and to hire some this as the ex skill person since it works as a source of truth and since it is stored in the all in the blockchain so we can trust it many other entity can come and join this project well I know it's a learning initiative but it sounds like I'm going to be selling it to all of my friends that they should probably start transitioning a lot of the way that they consider helping to teach others and inspire communities to a concept like this where we can really drive information back to a central repository that can help us validate it in separate ways outside of physical degrees. I know that that seems to create a lot of different private silos and I think that one of these things that this is doing it is breaking apart all the silos of private data and really happy to see that I know it's a concept you've really hit on before Alfonso and I look forward to seeing how this really spreads worldwide. David Boswell from Hyperledger would be sending emails to all the people that registered with not only the record the link to the recordings but also the links to the Hyperledger lab, the GitHub repository and so you would have in your emails that information to connect to further continue working on this. I know I've definitely taken advantage of it and Alexandra, I hope that we get to meet a little bit more through that and I do apologize. I have terrible internet connection and Diana, thank you so much it's a pleasure to be able to learn more about what you're all working on. I know it's an exciting opportunity and if I can learn how to align a little bit more whatever structure you have it'll really bring a lot of benefits to my community and hopefully I can help spread the word. Diana That's fantastic. Thank you so much for interacting with us. Please feel free to contact us if you want to hear more about the token taxonomy framework. Again, all of our resources are open source and free to use for the community and we're here for any needs on guidance implementation community aspects. This collaboration with Hyperledger is amazing and we really hope that the implementation of common standards for tokens in the education space can really take off. Alexander is asking do you have a set of heuristic that you use or have a roadmap for this validation? It's interesting because we are relying Alexander on the instructors who is them. The instructor we allow the institution to register whomever instructors the courses but we allow them to set up scoring guides and scoring guides is the grading policy that each instructor has to validate what they want to validate. We suggest but it's only a suggestion we suggest as many grading ways around the world letters, numbers what happen. We suggest that maybe learning tokens could be given as percentages. So a scoring guide for a course, any course would be 100 100 points and the instructor is the one that defines how many points are given for attending. It's quite valid for people just to attend and listen and learn by listening. How many points do you give as an instructor? You give for the quizzes the homeworks, the code that you have to write now and how many tokens do you give to recognize the engagement in the community? No. These engagement tokens are the ones that are fungible. Those are the ones that we want to create a market around helping and collaborative learning. But also you would have a way of recognizing the ability of the instructor to teach and so you give tokens to the instructor. We accept that scoring guide as valid and if the institution is registered, the instructor is registered, the course and the scoring guides are registered in the registry of trust or the trust register then whenever the instructor wants, he is the one that creates and transports opens. So the validation is there. The validation is in the hands of the instructor and the registry of trust is open. It's open to all. And the wallets are open to the self sovereign identity control to show what you want to who you want to. Does that answer what you ask? Yes it does. Can you hear me? Just checking the mic. Yeah, thank you very much. Wonderful presentation. Very, very interesting. I love the space. I've been working kind of closer tangential to it for a while. I started looking at algorithmic central banks and things like that and kind of moved more into web three and actually web two and web one two. I have a technical interest in that kind of stuff. But this is fascinating. I really, really like this idea. Not only from a financial standpoint, but I think this could revolutionize education. You are most welcome. I agree absolutely with you. Can we just, as you left your contact information, we can just reach out if we're interested in collaborating after we take a look at it and kind of go through the code and stuff. Please do. Please do. We'll be delighted. We'll be delighted to hear and to continue together. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I guess like the way we have expected there is a lot of attendees and we're happy to have all of you here and we're looking forward to have the feedbacks and because we are looking forward to make something standard that can be adopted out all. So in that case, we need the feedbacks from all of you and the supports as well. Brendan wrote in the chat 100% revolutionize education becoming a global system of recognition, knowledge and skill. Yes. That's what we're aiming for. We're aiming for building together a standard and here is where GBBC and TTL come into play. We build together. Standards have to be built together and should not be imposed. And once we build together that standard then we have a chance for people like you and more to come to say, hey, I think that's useful. Let's use it. And as they use it, they would say, well, yeah, but why don't we make a little change here and there will come to the working standard moves and modify the standard. No. But always. Yes. I'm so sorry to interrupt you, Alfonso. What's been the reception from the general already stated university community that already has a scheme in place? Have you received a warm reception or have they been a little bit more on the reticent side? Well, we haven't had enough. We just began. This is our second year with the mentorship program for learning tokens. Last year at the very beginning we had the pilot project which was very, very small and didn't have the success that we had this year. It was good. No, but it was not as advanced as a SPESH did in this year. Was with Jesuit University in El Salvador. And it was a very small not in the curriculum, but a parallel Excel course. And so we are completing this phase. In fact, we finished the 30th of November two weeks ago. Now it's the time to really begin testing the waters and well, there would be there would be interest. There would be a lot of suggestions for improvements and we are welcome to to all of them. That's what building standards is all about. I'm so sorry to interrupt. Maybe I missed this. When is going to be the first working group session? We haven't defined it yet. We're going to complete the joint report. I'm happy to say quite advanced. Okay. And after having that report and with all this recording, we'll distribute it to all of you and began distributing as Diana said. Johnny speaks Spanish also. Diana. Here I am with you if you need anything, thank you. Nice to meet you. And Johnny and Alexander Diana explained that the global standard mapping initiative with the help of Jackson it's been going on for four years and this last edition has almost 2,000 institutions. Jackson has been instrumental in advancing the TTF and can be a resource for anyone with any questions. And we'd like to reach out to them Alexander. Thanks for all the hard work Jackson. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you guys. It's a lot of work Jackson. You can tell us more about it. What are the plans behind you, Alfonso? The sketches the architectural drawings? Yes. Yes. Are they of a cathedral or... Well, it's always good to aim for the stars. That's it. We might get to Cancun to be good, which is nearby. But we're aiming for the stars. Excellent. So it is a cathedral. And as cathedrals go it might take a lot of time but each stone that we put we want to put it in place to support more stones on top of it. Wow. And that's why we're working with you guys at GBBC. It's a circular finance. And all the other people at Hyperledger also. A lot of the special interest groups that might benefit from learning tokens. And Hyperledger itself. It has a series of courses. If I could ask what would be the one-year goal that maybe we could just kind of openly share is something that the GBBC is kind of aspiring that would transpire out of this. I know that it's an incredible opportunity to get it out to the public. But once it's out there it's like, come on. Whatever way that you're inspiring. But what is the ideal goal here? I see that there's a lot of synergies with potentially the reeducation and the reconnection with jobs. Is that somewhere where you guys want to go to work? I mean, Jackson, you run a lot of the working groups and a lot of the TTF traction has been in the area of environmental, carbon credits, accounting for carbon credits. I'm sure please say more, but it's community-oriented. It's a big crowd source. Yeah, so from the GBBC side I can speak a little bit to the kind of working groups that the inter-work alliance and the kind of membership of GBBC being fairly broad, it goes across industries and includes academic institutions. So there is an opportunity potentially for a working group to come out of this either under GBBC or under Hyperledger that can go a little bit more into this. Within the IWA the kind of specifications, standards are applied and so we produce all implementation neutral so we don't want to gate anyone in our community for a particular platform and so the Token Taxonomy Framework gives us that kind of avenue to describe tokens in a way where you could build them into your system and have a level of interoperability between different platforms and so allowing our members to come together and discuss the use cases, learn from implementations and kind of incorporate those learnings back into the standard is kind of what we do regularly for our work so as this use case evolves it gets more traction and gets more buy-in from different stakeholders there's definitely opportunities for working groups as well as the tie in the Diana made with the global standards mapping initiative that we do using that as a resource and allowing Alfonso and the team to use that as a resource to reach out to different academic institutions that may be interested in blockchain and digital assets not only for their participation in the project itself registering their own courses but also giving their expertise and knowledge on the education field back to the standard and the guidance so that it's more applicable and we make sure that it's difficult to get all of the requirements at once and have it all implemented and put together all on the first go so learning from the implementations and the feedback that we get from the different players that that guidance and those token standards touch is extremely important so that can also be an avenue for feedback in that way yeah we're always open to feedback on our listing of courses and we have a community obviously of observing member institutions who are educational institutions as part of the and this is an interesting topic of conversation and we're also thinking of running round tables moving forward as well as conversations to engage the community and membership on topics of interest so if this is one we can take ideas and feedback and turn it into some space where we can provide some suggestions and continue this conversation Thank you Thank you very much I'm at the top of the hour I'm really delighted that we were short on the presentation and very long on the Q&A because that indicates that we have to continue Q&As further ahead I want to thank you Pesh first because without his work in this six months we wouldn't be where we are Thank you Pesh for a great opportunity I enjoyed very much working with you I also want to thank GBBC for their support and for their interest to continue and of course Hyperledger both at the Hyperledger mentorship program and Hyperledger at large as that beautiful huge almost cathedral size Jackson no for open source and blockchain so thank you very much all of you for being here and for your interest to continue being with us Thank you Thank you very much Thank you everyone Bye Bye Great to meet you