I'm not 100% sure this post is on topic as I'm not offering paid work. But the forum title does include the phrase "help wanted" and I certainly need that.

In the spirit of John Quiggin, I am putting my book (in preparation) online in order to get feedback and correct errors before publication. Anyone that sends me feedback (positive or negative) will get a credit in the book.

The book already gives a reference to Karl and this website.

To give you a flavour: The book is influenced by the work of Steve Keen, Michael Hudson and Peter Schiff.

The website is http://www.goplusplus.com/book

Delete the first sentence in the preface; it is awkward and the paragraph has more power without it.

Second paragraph, capitalize "great depression".

3rd paragraph after the table... "There are some highly counter-intuitive..." perhaps "There are several counter-intuitive...". Also in this paragraph, is 'feature' the best word, or would 'aspect' be better?

Final paragraph: "If they can not do so, then you can rest assured that there is no way they could properly understand economics." This sentence could use a rework.

-----CH 1-----
“It’s a process that, even today, few bankers understand” (italicize the quote)
– Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize in Economics, 1976.


"It is worth considering for a moment, a few misconceptions about money and how much of it exists in our economy. This is what most non-economists would assume:"

Perhaps something like:
"A few misconceptions about money and how much of it exists are worth considering:"
"Here are a few common misconceptions about the economy's money supply:"
"Misconceptions about money and how much of it exists in the economy abound. Here are a few: // Here are a few held commonly by non-economists:"
Regardless of what you decide to do, the original will not work. You should at least remove the comma.

"non-understanding" should be "misunderstanding".

---------
I have to stop right now because I am sleepy. I must say though, I like the style of the book. I am getting into economics right now, and your examples on fractional reserve banking make the topic very easy to understand.

Are you planning on having this book printed, or keeping it online? If you are getting it printed, you might want to hire an editor to smooth it out.

Also, I noticed that you have a PhD in neural networks. The thought came to me a few weeks ago that perhaps if we had the equipment to measure these connections accurately, the contents of a brain could be recorded digitally. I have almost no background in neurobiology, but some in computer science. Is this a concept floated in your field at all?

--Clayton

Thanks for taking a look. Your wish is my command. I agreed with all of your comments and have updated the documents accordingly.

With regard "smoothing it out" - yes I will get someone to sort out all of those kind of issues - but there is little point in doing it until the very end of the process, so for now I am not worrying about it at all.
The issues I'm concerned with most are:

# Is it understandable?
# Is it interesting?... do you feel motivated to turn the page?
# Is it correct?

No the book won't stay online forever - I do hope to have it published - even if it ends up be self-published (which is very easy these days).

Re the brain monitoring. Well yes, the electrical activity of individual neurons can be monitored and recorded - but we have upwards of 10 billion of them, so the wiring required to monitor all of them would be rather hard to install!

By the way, feel free to send your comments directly to me at reissgo@gmail.com

Cheers,
Mick.

I'd be happy to help you proofread it for typos and such. PM if interested.

I have good credentials for this type of work which I'd rather not discuss in "public."

Giving it a read right now... So far so good. I won't be able to tell you whether or not it is 100% correct, but I will be able to ask questions and hopefully either prove what I have learned, or illuminate what was not explained well.

Big FAIL in chapter numero uno, stopped reading at that point.

" When people "store" their money in banks, they know full well that the banks may use some of it to lend out to other people. This immediately begs the question "what happens if I want to take all my money
out again at short notice". The answer is that the banks never lend out all your money, they keep some in reserve. So if you want to take it all out then the bank can give you back that fraction of your
money that they didn't lend out, with the remainder made up from the pool of un-lent-out parts of everyone else's accounts."

Banks don't create money and don't lend out from savings. If you don't get even this very simple fact right, why should one read further?

They manufacture assets called loans using their labor and capital which can then be used or sold. It's no different than if they were manufacturing cars.

@GRF - to save you having to write a whole essay - could you just point me to an article/blog/book that supports your view. I will read it with interest.

I presume you saw the cartoon in that chapter with the queue of men outside the shop. I have two questions:
1. Do you deny that the scenario in the cartoon can happen?
2. If it can happen, do you deny that the cheques the men will use are money?

Cheers,
Mick.

@Mick

Gen has written about it multiple times, do a search here.

I saved you some time, here:

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?single....

Thank you for the link - I have read through it a couple of times and I can't help feeling Karl has made a mistake. I will sleep on it and come back to this later - but for now, I was wondering is this Karl's own pet theory - or is he getting this from somewhere else? (and if so where?)

I dunno, I think Mick has fractional-reserve lending basically right. There is cash on hand at all commercial banks, just not enough to cover all demand deposit accounts wanting to withdraw at once.

The issue is probably that banks have other sources of funding than just deposits. Banks also can make loans using money raised by selling stock or issuing their own debt. All of those liabilities combine to make sure there's cash on hand for the loans they make and the potential withdrawal of customer deposits.

Often banks can issue more loans than they take in customer cash deposits.

There's also a simple "efficiency" issue ... it was (correctly) deemed inefficient & pointless (by banks and by gov't) to keep 100% of deposits on hand in the form of cash because the NEED to do that simply didn't exist ... years (hundreds) of bankster experience have shown them how much cash they actually have to have on hand to meet a vast majority (>99.9%) of events.