Two-factor economics makes it clear that our economic problem is not what one-factor (labor-centric) thinkers assert: an inequitable distribution of income. It is an inequitable distribution of productive power, from which an unworkable distribution of income results.

Our present predicament comes from the fact that running the economy on blood is no longer fashionable. We can't end this depression with another war.

The poor lack money. They lack money because they do not know the secret of productive wealth. They know it is possible to be old, unemployed, uneducated, lazy - even halt, deaf, dumb, and blind-and still be excessively rich. But you have to be in on the secret, and the poor by definition are not.

We have an economic policy that is just about 10,000 years out of date.

It is the institutions of society, not parental genes, that bestow the blessings of ownership of productive capital.

The way the system now works, credit is extended to those who don't need it and denied to those who are in desperate need of it.

But would the young do any better under the same circumstances? Will they do any better when their turns come? The answer is that youth would not and cannot, given the financial and economic framework within which the elders are operating. While the moral convictions of individuals are important in the long run, it is institutions that determine the immediate course of events - particularly the institutions of finance.