When I was a kid I thought the universe was infinite. Not for any sophisticated reason. If there is a brick wall out there, what is on the other side of it? That seemed like the end of the argument.
Then I went to college and everybody told me the universe was a certain size. I didn't really understand it. Maybe it's true. Maybe you keep going and come back to where you started. I don't know.
What I know now is that they left a word out. They meant the observable universe. They just didn't say observable, because among themselves it went without saying. I thought "universe" meant everything there is. That is what the word sounds like it means. Now people are talking about universes beyond our universe, and the word I was handed doesn't fit anymore.
I'm a little annoyed about it. Not because anyone lied. Because the precise word was right there and nobody used it, and I think that narrowed the thinking of a generation of people. I should have questioned more. It never occurred to me there was anything to question.
Here's the other one. Fractional reserve banking.
Years ago we had dinner with a coworker of my wife's and her husband, who teaches economics at the University of Washington. He works on game theory, which I thought was genuinely interesting. So I asked him about fractional reserve banking. He said he had never thought about it. Not that I was wrong. That it had never come up as a question.
I'd heard the argument for it. You couldn't lend without it. I understand you can lend money that has been saved, but the claim is that you also need to lend out some multiple of it, or the economy doesn't function properly. Nobody ever walked me through why. It is one of those statements that gets made, and everybody takes it for granted.
So I went and looked it up, which is the part I skipped the first time.
The story I was handed has a name: the money multiplier. Banks take in deposits, hold back a fraction, lend out the rest. It turns out the people who run the system don't tell that story anymore. The Bank of England put it in writing in 2014: banks don't lend out the deposits savers place with them. Making the loan is what creates the deposit. The Bundesbank said the same thing in 2017. The textbook answer I couldn't get proven has been walked back by the central banks themselves.
Which leaves the part I can see plainly. A bank is allowed to lend out money it doesn't have. The act of lending is what brings the money into existence. The profits from that are privatized. When it fails at scale, the losses are socialized. That sounds like a scam to me. Maybe there's an answer to that. Nobody has given me that one either.
If you want the thing that got me asking in the first place, it's a 2006 documentary called Money as Debt. It has a point of view. Watch it like it has one.
Both of these are the same shape. Something gets repeated until it stops sounding like a claim. Then you ask, and the person best placed to answer turns out never to have had the question put to them.