Acknowledgements
This film was made by one person and a machine. The economics underneath it were not.
The economics — Rebel Economist Challenge
The spine of this story is Professor Steve Keen's work: private debt as the thing that actually moves an economy, Minsky's instability hypothesis, and the stock-flow modelling that makes both of them testable rather than rhetorical. The film's economics were worked through in Minsky and Ravel, the modelling tools he builds with Russell Standish.
That is the theory. The harder question was whether it survives being turned into a story — whether someone who has never read a word of economics can watch a man take delivery of the machine that ends his trade, and understand why owning a share of it changes everything. Nobody who built the film could answer that. We all knew the argument too well to see it cold.
So it went to the people who would know. Steve put the call out to his Rebel Economist Challenge community himself — twice — and asked them to find where the floor gives way. Before he did, not one reader had ever asked to see the script. In the four days after, eleven did. Their notes are being carried into the next version.
Two things are owed for that. This page is one. The other is plainer: watch his work, and pass it on. He is trying to get an argument in front of enough people that it changes something — which is the only reason this film exists either.
The readers
A number of people have read this script before it was finished and told us where it loses them — economists, filmmakers, and strangers who simply asked. They are not listed here, because nobody should be named on a public page for having been generous in private.
That changes when a suggestion lands. Anyone whose note becomes a line, a scene, or a fix in the film is credited by name in the film itself. That is the deal, and it has not moved.