The fabric and leather-bound manuscript has 31 leaves of both parchment and paper. Certain pages are written upside down, so Piorko had to flip the entire notebook to read it. It was on one of those inverted pages that she found a puzzling passage written in code. On an opposing page was a strange-looking table filled with letters. She didn’t know it at the time, but the coded text had been hiding the alchemists’ recipe to the elixir of life—what those in the profession called the “Philosopher’s Stone.”

Michael Birshan: The value flows from corporations to households through eight different pathways. If you take a dollar of revenue that the average corporation generates, 25 cents of that flows through as labor income: wages, salaries, and other benefits to employees. Seven cents of that dollar goes to capital income, meaning dividends, share buybacks, and interest payments to debtholders. Six cents goes to investment—earnings that are retained to be invested in new productive assets—and four cents to production and corporate taxes. The remaining 58 cents goes to supplier payments, which then result in labor income, capital income, investment, and tax pathways for those supplier companies.