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Pawlo Lawriw
Born in the industrial Northern town of Huddersfield West Yorkshire to a Ukrainian father and an Italian mother, the formative years of life were at times gritty and hard but honest and fair. Most...view more Born in the industrial Northern town of Huddersfield West Yorkshire to a Ukrainian father and an Italian mother, the formative years of life were at times gritty and hard but honest and fair. Most of my adult life was spent in various employments ranging from being in the Military Police (a stint which included serving in the First Gulf War) to becoming a croupier and working around the world including on cruise ships around the Caribbean and various 'joints' in South Africa. I undertook my first writing project, this book on hyperinflation after returning to education in my late 50's and studied for a BA in Economics, which I completed in 2021. As part of my dissertation, I combined two subject areas I have always had an interest in, history and money. Starting the research thinking it would be primarily about modern history I very quickly discovered that a modern problem, inflation is firmly rooted in the past. I became so engrossed and fascinated in the subject I promised myself if I had any spare time I would try and author a short book on the subject. A year later and with no real time on my hands as I was working with children with emotional and behavioural problems, I decided to undertake the writing of this book anyway, in truth not expecting to finish it, but somehow with lots of encouragement from the kids I was working with it became a mission, so here we are, my first attempt at a book. I have tried to add interesting and unusual episodes of history to keep the readers interest such as how the eunuchs became a powerful force in the ancient Chinese dynasties and contributed to these dynasties' downfalls and also kept data to a minimum, too much data, in my opinion, is a bug bear and probably has contributed more than most things to bad decisions being made by modern governments around the world; all this can be related to Goodhart's Law, which is an adage from British economist Charles Goodhart in 1975 when discussing the problems of the British economy, where he sums it up perfectly stating 'When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.' On this subject of data and the overuse of it, I think the most perfect quote to encapsulate this can be attributed to the British economist Ronald Coarse who said about the subject "If you torture the data long enough and hard enough, you'll eventually get it to confess to anything".view less