On foreign policy, "The Union of Civilizations" might serve as an enlightened policy offset to the old-think clash of civilizations.
["Union of Civilizations"!? What does that mean? Most Canadians don't even want to unite with the deteriorating "civilization" to the south, which is currently clashing civilizations for all its worth with Islam in general and Iraq in particular, and "has a little list" of future clashes: Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Libya.... And most North Americans don't even want to unite with the mongo third-world economy of China, but this is getting shoved down their throats by the globalizers, who are thereby killing their home employment and consumer bases.]
...In the past, it's been okay for the Official Opposition to lie low because the governing party has been in the process of defeating itself. But Mr. Harper's government isn't defeating itself....
[If snuggling up to the corrupt and incompetent Bush administration which is in the process of defeating itself isn't "defeating itself" then what is?]
[It ain't just the US Democrats that lack a vision - check out the New Democrats in Canada -]
3/14/2007 Lament for the left, editorial, Ottawa Citizen, A16.
New Democrat Member of Parliament Pat Martin has turned his rhetorical guns on a surprising yet deserving target: his own party. The NDP needs to be bolder and clearer in its vision for Canada, Mr. Martin said amid slipping poll numbers....
9/21/2006 Goodbye to All That? - A review of Leszek Kolakowski's "Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown" and his "My Correct Views on Everything," by Tony Judt, in New York Review of Books, 88 (our excerpt, 92).
...Marxism...was the deep "structure" of much progressive politics.
[Not very deep for a deep structure! How deep is Marx's 3-step prescription: (1) Workers of the world, unite. (2) Throw off your chains. (3) Nationalize everything." Like, uh, what then? This is slightly better than Henry George's single tax on land, but not nearly as meaty as Timesizing's 5 phases and its series of 5-phase successor programs to deconcentrate one black hole of advantage after another and keep up with everyone's rising expectations.]
Marxist language, or a language parasitic upon Marxist categories, gave form and explicit coherence to many kinds of modern political protest: from social democracy to radical feminism. ...The loss of Marxism as a way of relating critically to the present really has left an empty space.
[An empty space that timesizing and worktime economics and their successors can fill.]
With Marxism have gone not just dysfunctional Communist regimes and their deluded foreign apologists, but also the whole schema of assumptions, categories and explanations created over the past 150 years that we had come to think of as "the left." Anyone who has observed the confusion of the political left in North America or Europe over the past 20 years and asked themselves "But what does it stand for? What does it want?" will appreciate the point.
[Timesizing stands for an end to allowing the elite, any elite, to continue to have both general and specific power over everyone's livelihood. Their current power of hiring and firing against a background of deep and growing labor surplus is a double draft of hemlock for sustainability and real economic growth. We cannot take away their specific power of hiring and firing. But we must end the wage-depressing, consumerbase-weakening labor surplus and move beyond that. And that is exactly what Timesizing allows us to do.]
11/05/2004 Why we lost - Democrats have [opposition and] ideas, but no vision, by Andrei Cherny, special policy adviser to John Kerry from Feb/2003 to Apr/2004; NYT, A27.
...Democrats have a collection of policy positions that are sensible and right.... What we don't have , and what we sorely need, is what Pres. George H.W. Bush so famously derided as "the vision thing" - a worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is headed and where we want to take it.
For most of the 20th century, Democrats had a bold vision: we would use government programs to make Americans' lives more stable and secure.
[- most critically, via government job creation, alias makework - despite an effective but forgotten episode of whole-economy (ie: by far mostly non-governmental) work sharing, alias sharework, between 1938 (nationwide 44-hour workweek) and 1940 (40-hr wk) and a nearly enacted also forgotten episode (30-hr wk passed by US Senate) in 1933.]
In 1996, Pres. Clinton told us this age had passed, that "the era of big government is over." He was right - the world had changed.
[No, he was wrong. The Republican government, now taken over by corrupt energy, mostly oil, companies, is now far bigger and more intrusive in Americans' private lives, though more lax and permissive toward big business, than ever, but all is covered with a staged war and 'national security' needs.]
But the [Democratic] party has not answered the basic question: What comes next?
[Obviously, some version of small government. And that means some intelligent minimalist design that can deliver a Democrat-style social safety net with Republican-style small-government and low taxes = the minimum necessary departure from status quo instead of the maximum, a stable minimum of freeing generalized controls instead of a burgeoning maximum of stifling detailed controls; ideally, a single all-sufficient groundrule that renders the whole system sustainable, like the Hebrew jubilee, the Hopi redistributive dances, the Tlingit potlatch, the reset of all teams in sports leagues to zero-games-won at the beginning of each season, high estate taxes, instead of allowing the system to get top-heavy, cannibalize its own consumer base, undermine itself and crash.]
It's not the sort of question that gets answered in the heat of a national election, [which] is not the place to devise a new thematic direction for the party. What you wind up offering are quips and quibbles, slogans and sound bites, and heaping portions of poll-tested pablum.
The press also seems to overstate what staff changes can do within a campaign.... While new advisers can alter tactics and form new messages, efforts on their part to create a larger vision will fail. That has to happen long before the primaries - and it requires that the party knows where it is going.
Throughout the campaign, voters told reporters that they wanted a change, but didn't "know what John Kerry stands for." Our response was to churn out more...details of policies.... It turned out that Americans weren't very interested.... They wanted to know instead how he saw the world. And we never told them.
[So they assumed that the Democrat vision was still basically the New Deal of big government makework, warmed over and possibly again renamed as it was during the Great Society and the War on Poverty, etc., both smaller than Bush Jr. or Reagan government makework but unfunneled, and unrationalized, by funneling through the Pentagon.]
Misguided as they may be, the Republicans have a clear vision of America's future.
[Yeah, a vision even further in America's past = the 1920s, instead of the Democrats' 1930s.]
Confronted with their agenda, we have not chosen to match it.
[or "been able to match it."]
Instead, we have adopted Nancy Reagan's old antidrug motto, "Just Say No." As in "Stop Bush's Assault on the Environment", "Repeal Bush's Taxcuts for the Rich", and "End Bush's Unilateralism". These are good stands. But they are not enough. And the Republicans ended up defining John Kerry because we did not.
[And unlike Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich, he himself did not.]
I don't pretend to know exactly what the party should do now. But I do know that we better start answering some important questions.
- What is our economic vision in a globalized world?
[For starters, "we" must stop accepting the Republican framing of the issue and that means questioning the here-taken-for-granted backdrop of "a globalized world." Accept that unquestioningly as Cherny has here and you've already lost, as George Lakoff has been trying to point out to Democrats. Instead, Dems should be redefining it based on the principle, "Companies only get to access our consumer base indefinitely insofar as they maintain it with employment and wages, and otherwise they only get to access it temporarily until we replace their products or skills domestically." Then we get in line with the UN and the World Court and the Test-Ban Treaty and all the other global stuff that WE set up FOR EVERYONE and then pulled out of. We need a lot more world leadership by example and a lot less leadership by "Do as I say and not as I do." As Grannie used to say, "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander." Then quit playing around with people's livelihoods and drive right for full employment, as Timesizing's Phases Two, Three and Four do - control inflation not by fostering unemployment and hobbling growth as we do now but by balancing inflationary and deflationary incentive throughout the economy, as described in Timesizing Phase 3 but begun in Phase 2.]
- How do we respond to the desire of many Americans to have choices and decision-making power of their own?
[Copy and extend the advanced Swiss system of direct democracy via issue-oriented referendums. Buckminster Fuller's vision was for issue-oriented 24-hour telephone referendums that turned congressional "representatives" into mere housekeepers of the public will. This is the thrust of Phase One of the Timesizing Full Employment Program. But for God's sake, stop George Soros from wasting his billions on get-out-the-vote efforts and get him to buy the Republicans' corrupt voting-machine companies (Diebold etc.) out from under him or start Democrat-owned companies of his own, insisting that they be bought and installed everywhere a Republican machine is installed - until the cheating spirit of Karl Rove is washed out of the American spirit. And get constitutional amendments to move beyond the Electoral College, require paper trails and bar the judicial branch (Supreme Court) from interfering in legislative-branch recounts. There can be no checks and balances without separation of powers and there can be no separation of powers between the three branches of government when one branch (eg: Supreme Court) can arrogate decision-making power that constitutionally belongs to another branch (eg: Congress), regardless of hullaballooed national delay, inconvenience or embarrassment.]
- How can we speak to Americans' moral and spiritual yearnings?
[(A) By taking a very long-term ecological view of our future with supreme emphasis on sustainability, and (B) by otherwise KEEPING GOVERNMENT AND POLITICIANS OUT OF RELIGION and religion out of government and politics - and by moving on to build on this separation between religion and politics ("church and state") to separate politics and economics ("state and market"). The whole purpose of the vote was to outflank the all-encompassing but severely flawed decision-making power of self-insulating and -isolating wealthy people and get some real feedback and flexibility into the system, and when the Supreme Court in 1976 confused freedom of speech with unlimited political donations, that fundamental purpose was destroyed, and it was just a matter of time before America reverted to a plutocratic hegemony or dictatorship, and thence, a kleptocracy, ruled by thieves legitimated by their own self-serving laws. With the rigged "election" of 2004, that has now essentially happened but the oil-corporatists (aka 'fascists') in the Bush cabal have not yet consolidated their stranglehold enough to block protest meetings and purge the Internet - ie: the thousands of sites like this one (Timesizing.com).]
- How can our national security vision be broader than just a critique of the Republicans' foreign policy?
[For starters, you don't go after 19 guys with box cutters with $415 billion in huge weaponry and a strained and probably staged attempt to reframe/translate the whole problem into one of old-fashioned conventional warfare (though with costly new weapons). You fight fire with fire, low-cost strategy, creativity and intelligence with low-cost strategy, creativity and intelligence. And most of all, you "let justice roll down like waters" (Amos 5:24) in line with the best of the Hebrew Bible, not resorting to war in line with the worst of the Hebrew Bible. This means you listen to the valuable feedback in the motivation behind the desperate suicide attackers (suicide is the most desperate, unlistened-to project there is) and you solve the problem at its root - our plutocrats' wildly partial, unreferendumized support for the racist and creedist state of Israel, regardless of what they do to their neighbors. "Who can, by stirring, clear muddy waters - but leave them alone, and they will come clear of themselves." - Lao Tzu.]
If we sweep this debate under the rug, four years from now another set of people around another conference table will be struggling with the same issues we did....
[And you do NOT "wait till the election," as we heard sooo often during the last four years when the Democrats should have been screaming for impeachment, but lacking courageous leadership, chickened out. The Republicans would certainly have been screaming for impeachment within the first six months of 2001, because the Republicans were screaming for impeachment throughout Clinton's presidency over much less serious matters. The Democrats have consistently failed to understand what kind of politics America has descended to and what they're up against. For them, it's still the '70s. Wakey, wakey, chillun.]
11/04/2004 Beaten again, Democrats ponder shift in philosophy, by Jeanne Cummings, WSJ, A1.
[and Times version -]
A stunned party looks to the internal debate ahead - Democrats are left wondering just how to proceed, by James Bennet, NYT, P8.
[i.e., Dems have ideas, but no vision.]
10/16/2004 Debate, declaim, debacle - How would you save the world, sir? You have 90 seconds, op ed by David Brooks, NYT, A31.
[Answer:
- getting real about how bad things really are by redefining unemployment to include our whole problem of non-self-support,
- implementing automatic overtime-to-training&hiring (for corporations
- and individuals - this switches inflation control from fostering growth-damping unemployment to balancing the inflationary money motive with deflationary job satisfaction),
- maximize home-based economic dynamism and growth by maximizing our domestic consumer base and sustainable citizen self-support through a policy of automatically guaranteed full employment - by letting the new comprehensive unemployment rate automatically determine the workweek,
- offering the option of pausing and shifting pressure to one or more of the population variables
- and being ready to move on to the next balancing and sharing technology once this program has allowed sensitivities and expectations to exceed what it's capable of delivering.
This involves dropping pie-in-the-sky myths like "technology creates more jobs than it destroys" - always somewhere else at some other time - which we're defeating here and now by downsizing instead of timesizing, and like the sneering rhetoric of the "lump of labor fallacy" - which insults the reponsible view of here&now limitations on job openings by quietly omitting to define a time period.]
9/18/2004 Lexington column - Yesterday's men, and tomorrow's - Is the neo-conservative's moment over?, The Economist Magazine (of London), 43.
[No, because...]
...The lesson of the past four years is not just that ideas have consequences. It is that even the Republican Party, once ridiculed as the stupid party, needs intellectual fuel to keep it going.
So far, for all their mistakes, the neo-cons still have no real rivals when it comes to supplying that.\.need[ed] intellectual
fuel....
[It was back under the last days of Pres. Jimmy Carter that we realized the Democrats were bankrupt of ideas. They had no vision for the future. They were running on the fumes of the New Deal, makework warmed over, again and again. But so were the Republicans - but in their case the makework was funneled through the Pentagon and married to a vision of the past, specifically the 1920s - in a colossal denial of the failures of that period (eg: 1929). Neither party is noticing the Third Way -
not (1) No Work with small government,
and not (2) Makework or Job Creation whether civilian (Democrat) or military (Republican) focused in the public sector, with resulting Big Government, as has now become obvious,
but (3) Sharework or Worksharing focused in the private sector, with small government. At the cost of getting things out of chronological order, let's look at a more recent assessment that answers the question, what happened to the political left and their vision?]
8/16/2004 A central banker's nightmare: Inflation and slow growth together, by Patrick Barta, WSJ, A2.
[i.e., stagflation, a standard condition in the Third World as Jane Jacobs points out, is a central banker's nightmare because nothing in his superficial toolbox can fix it. However, the Timesizing program can fix it because Timesizing stops the silly attempt to control inflation by raising interest rates and slowing growth, and simply balances inflationary and deflationary incentive throughout the economy.]
8/12/2004 Painting the economy into a corner, editorial, NYT, A26.
pResident Bush 'reacted decisively' [our quotes & casing] to this month's [actually, July's] shockingly bad employment report [only 32,000 new jobs] - by quickly changing the topic to terror. The Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, also focused elsewhere, namely on rising oil prices. Mr. Greenspan used inflationary energy costs as the rationale for raising interest rates a quarter point, despite the drastic slump in hiring and a recent slowdown in productivity growth.
What neither man seems ready to acknowledge outright is that policy makers have run out of tools for stewarding the economy that - nearly 3 years into a recovery - has yet to flourish and may even be downshifting to neutral....
[We're "painting ourselves into a corner" from which Timesizing is only way out.]
8/09/2004 Admit we have a problem - The economic devastation is spreading, op ed by Bob Herbert, NYT, A19.
...The true believers \in\ the tattered pages of [Bush's] economic hymnbook...were jolted Friday [8/06/2004] by the news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that employers added a meager 32,000 jobs in July [instead of the forecasted 228,000 - see 8/06/2004 #6]. In an economy the size of America's, that's roughly equivalent to no jobs at all.
July's poor job-creation performance was widely described as unexpected. But it's important to keep in mind that it didn't occur in a vacuum and that there is no quick fix coming.
[Yes there is, but you have to think outside the box. The most efficient fix is worktime economics as in Timesizing. It kept the industrializing economies in rough trim from 1776 to 1929. It would have solved the Great Depression in less than two years if the Black Thirty Hour Work Week Bill had been pushed through the US House as well as the US Senate (53-30) in 1933. It corelated to a 1% cut in unemployment (19% to 14.6%) for every 1-hour cut in the workweek between 1938 and 1940 when finally pushed through starting at the 44-hour level. And it corelated to a 1% cut in unemployment for every 1-hour cut in the workweek between 1997 and 2001 when France pushed through a 35-hour workweek starting at the 39-hour level. And STILL, it is spun as a failure by trapped-in-the-box economists without examining the corelation to relevant unemployment behavior, or, they strain to attribute that behavior, causally and not just corelationally, to something, ANYthing, else; for example, "Change on the way? - The notorious 35-hour week is coming under increasing attack," The Economist 7/17/2004, 52. Why all the mainstream defensiveness, quick dismissal and gang-banging of shorter hours? It's clear that the largely nearsighted power elite, the economists they support with massive donations to their alma mater's and the analysts they support with their massive investment portfolios sense that worksharing via shorter working hours is a powerful and central strategy for bringing economies into a whole new level of balance (which they fear), because they would rather try anything, however inefficient and wasteful (like the New Deal) or destructive (like World Wars I and II and the many less effective brushfires since then, including Iraq) before seriously implementing flexible worksharing on a nationwide, or even economywide, basis with a can-do attitude. And this despite the phenomenal and well-known success of two entities that have been implementing worksharing for decades on the micro-economic level; namely, Nucor Steel and Lincoln Electric. And despite the resort to worksharing of a wide variety of designs by thousands of small and mid sized corporations during each and every recession. And despite the resort to worksharing, usually of the week-at-a-time design, by the Big Three auto companies every time they have a mismatch of production and sales on the overproduction side. But there's much more going on here:
- First, we're talking about manipulating the time dimension, and this makes a lot of people uncomfortable - they want the time dimension to be a constant and takable-for-granted part of the woodwork, not a variable let alone a control variable. Eyes rapidly glaze when you delve too deeply into time.
- Second, there is a lethal alliance against reducing worktime, despite the fact that practically all big technological innovations are sold on the basis of worktime savings -
- there's the deeply DEEPLY entrenched Puritan work ethic - let's even substitute the phrase, work morality - meaning work is Good and Moral and Industrious and free time is Bad and Immoral and the devil's opportunity and lazy and good-for-nothing and slacking and sponging and freeloading and dangerous and unhealthy
- there's the democratic self-importance of busyness - if I'm busier than you, even if I'm a garbageman and you're an executive, I'm entitled to feel more important than you, more in demand, more needed by The Market and/or society - there's no way TPTB (the powers that be) are going to lightly relinquish their stranglehold on their own illusion of self-importance when they've invested their lives in certain repetitive activities that they don't want to hear can be, or already have been, automated or robotized
- there's the pecking order to maintain - if I'm near the top, I'm damned if I'm going to share with the hoi polloi, whether wealth, income or employment, even if I'm strangling growth and spreading insecurity by not doing so - this is the famed Chesterton trap, the subtlest and strongest brake on economic growth that you can get, as suggested by Fred Hirsch in his "Social Limits to Growth"
- and there's the urge for control, however socio- or psycho-pathic - some employers want a maximum of face time from employees, however dysfunctional or wasteful that may be in particular instances - it's a phenomenon like rape, which many say is primarily a control or power issue - face time has become for some a kind of feudal tribute, an affirmation of their carefully constructed illusion of superiority
There's no way the powers that be are going to realize that the most revolutionary idea in mainstream economics is marginalism = the law (they continue to spin it as a theory) of the marginal utility of the over-concentration of value, where "too much" is defined by the accumulation of wasted resources at the bottom; for example, the accumulation of 1,000,000s of poor while we're getting 10,000s of new millionaires, or the accumulation of 1,000,000s of unemployed safely disguised in different categories (welfare, disability, homelessness, prison, suicide...) while we're getting 100,000s of new workaholics. Back to Bob Herbert -]
American workers are hurting.
"The weak job market [ie: high official plus hidden unemployment; ie: labor surplus] continues to put downward pressure on wage growth," said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. He noted that nominal wage growth on a year-over-year basis has been decelerating even as 'inflation' [our quotes] is increasing, which is bad news for an economy so dependent upon consumer spending [for 2/3 of GDP].
[Again, the critical pressure surfaces - the pressure that is going to force timesizing instead of downsizing upon a kicking and screaming power elite = the need to quit weakening consumer spending by fostering labor surplus and weakening employment and wages.]
In a report released by the Institute on Friday (8/06/2004), Mr. Bernstein wrote, "These job and wage dynamics [quelle langue prétentieux! - Herman Daly slings such purposely intimidating lingo for the ecological economics movement - now the worktime economics movement urgently needs its own "Herman Daly"!] erode workers' buying power, and this has negative implications for the strength of the recovery."
[Note the Economic Policy Institute, though about as close to the edge of the box as you can get and still be quoted, must still take on the prevailing self-deception of "recovery," thus guaranteeing that the dissonance between prevailing one-person-one-vote economics and next-level one-person-one-workweek-range economics will have to reach much more painful levels before the mainstream gets the guts to start dipping its toes outside the box into economic (re)design in general and worktime economics in particular.]
Retail sales in July were disappointing, hampered by high gasoline prices as well as anemic wage growth. And the stock market is in a prolonged swoon.
Despite the rosy rhetoric ...from the administration, millions of American families, including many that consider themselves solidly in the middle class, are in deep economic trouble.... It's getting harder and harder to close our eyes to the growing economic devastation....
There is no plan from the administration that I've heard of to brighten this bleak picture of the American economic landscape. John Kerry and John Edwards have an opportunity in the presidential campaign to offer their prescriptions [which are mainly lame revivals of New Deal makework ideas]. The first essential step for anyone serious about a search for solutions would be to recognize and acknowledge the sheer enormity of the problem.
[We track it every day in our 'doom du jour' and 'headlines from hell' sections.]
8/03/2004 They say they want a revolution, book review of Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri's "Multitude" (Penguin) by Gary Rosen, WSJ, D8.
Three years ago, Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri became the toast of the international left with the publication of "Empire," a ramshackle, theory-stuffed disquisition on globalization and its discontents. As the New York Times gushed, their theme was being talked about as the Next Big Idea, sending "frissons of excitement through campuses from Sao Paulo to Tokyo." Yet for all the supposed brilliance of their analysis, the book lacked what many of its readers most wanted: a guide to the future. "Yes, it's true," Mr. Hardt conceded to a critic. "We don't don't know what the revolution should be."
[And here is a warning that Timesizing or any answer to The Big Question may well take to heart -]
"Multitude" is too turgid and repetitious, too filled with the authors' idiosyncratic digressions, to be a true manifesto. Its prescriptions are so nonsensical that even fools would have difficulty following them....
[One possible reason for Timesizing's success in identifying and solving the Big Question is that it started from linguistics, not economics, and it started from 1 chapter of diagnosis (eg: need for growth-independent economics) and developed 9 chapters of cure, whereas most leftists and traditional reformers start from 9 chapters of diagnosis and wind up with only 1 of cure.]
[Here's a rather bizarre slanted example that shows the potential for the corruption of the 'Big Question' process -]
6/05/2004 $50B question: to solve the world's problems, where to begin? by Gary Andrew Poole, NYT, A15.
COPENHAGEN - What would you do with $50 billion assuming that the goal was the benefit of humankind?...
To answer that question, Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and environmental iconoclast, brought eight economists, including 3 Nobellists, to this harbor city to [identify and] rank the world's 10 worst problems. Forget politics, they were told, just look at how to get the most bang for the buck.
[As you will see, telling them to forget politics is easier than making them forget the politics that is more or less hardwired into their braincases alongside their income sources.]
...A global wishlist
Economists at the [nearly weeklong] Copenhagen Consensus discussed 38 solutions to the world's problems and ranked 17 of them. (They decided there was insufficient information to rank the others.)..\..
After studying all the contenders and running the numbers, the economic "dream team" decided that the best of the worst was
- controlling the spread of AIDS (worth $27B), followed by...
- $13B to combat malaria \and\
- $12B for malnutrition...[answer:] providing micronutrients [huh?]
[What a trio of bandaids! Well, AIDS could decimate workforces, raise wages and make for a loss of power by global plutocrats, never mind they never connect the dots from there to war-level prosperity - or more relevantly, plague-level prosperity, since the Black Death that carried off 25% of Europe in 1348 resulted in a labor shortage that centrifuged wealth and created a huge economic boom.
But note also they never connected the dots from malnutrition and disease to poverty, let alone from poverty to unemployment, and from unemployment to ridiculously high levels of employment concentration due to obsoletely high workweeks for economies so advanced in automation and robotics. Overlong worktime per person was not even on the list of rankable problems published in the NY Times, despite its position as a masterproblem in the sense that its solution would provide more free time and money for everyone to go after every other problem.]
Spending money on other scourges, like global warming or government corruption, by contrast, would be a bad investment. The conference, or what some would label a stunt, is characteristic of Mr. Lomborg, who has infuriated environmentalists and captivated the media with his claims that environmental threats are overblown.
[So clearly there's a political agenda. And the economists would have been carefully picked to guarantee an anti-environmentalist majority.]
...Bruno Frey, a Swiss economist who attended the conference, [said] he was insulted that the new media kept implying that Mr. Lomborg had manipulated the panel toward an anti-environmental agenda.
[Why should he manipulate them once he's carefully selected them?]
...Mr. Lomborg, [who] likes to dash around Copenhagen on his bike [sounds environmental enough!] wearing a bright yellow coat, smiling and waving to passers-by...is the director of the government-supported Environmental Assessment Institute. [He] was actually a Greenpeace activist at one time. He said he set out to refute the claims of skeptics, but ended up being convinced of their arguments. The result was a screed against the Chicken Little-view of environmental dangers, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," which was published in 1998 [2001 in English] and continues to provoke fierce controversy.... The Observer of London reported that a "secret White House memo" cited Mr. Lomborg's book to help Republicans deflect criticism about their environmental policies.... Last year a scientific ethics panel accused Mr. Lomborg of "scientific dishonesty," though [it] withdrew its charge after the Danish Ministry of Science rebuked the panel for failing to present sufficient evidence.
...All the attendees [were] paid $30,000 to attend the conference, which was sponsored by Institute and The Economist magazine.
[Hooboy. The 'usual suspects' emerge deep within the article.]
..\..A "counter-conference" was held in a room in the Parliament building.... Christian Ege, chairman of the Danish Ecological Council and leader of the counter conference, said: "Lomborg presents himself as an impartial scholar, drawing conclusions on a well-founded basis. But it is a basis rejected by most of those with knowledge of environmental studies."...
Mr. Lomborg defended the underlying premise of the conference:
[Oh so buried in paragraph 15 we finally find out that there was an "underlying premise of the conference" despite being told in paragraph 2 that participants were supposed to "forget politics," i.e., bias.]
"Abrupt change is needed to help the developing world...."
[The developed world is the source of the world's most serious problems, not the developing world. Interesting how so many first-world 'geniuses' can only see the mote in the Third World's eye, despite the beam in their own.]
[Here's an interesting form of the Big Question -]
5/08/2004 If affirmative action fails...what then? - Special treatment for blacks is unpopular and not too effective - got any better ideas? by David Chappell, NYT, A17.
[Sure, Timesizing. A shorter workweek creates a labor shortage and multiplies jobs and pay regardless of race, gender and age. However, NAACP leader Julian Bond thinks affirmative action is being attacked not because it has failed but because it has succeeded. It's popular with blacks but presumably unpopular with rightwingers, as indeed anything progressive is, even when it's in their own self interest.]
4/02/2004 Democracy, charity, and the market, op ed by George H. Rosen, Boston Globe, A23.
...A free market has no strategy for the absence of generosity and no answer for the lack of love.
[Let's juxtapose this first with a recent letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal, and then turn it into a question -]
Generosity has a place in capitalism's roughhouse, letter to editor by Mark M. Nakagawa of L.A., 4/08/2004 WSJ, A17.
As both a customer and stockholder, I applaud Costco's generous treatment of its employees. Costco is a rare find for investors who desire corporate responsibility and a fair return on equity in one package. To those analysts and investors who aren't happy with Costco's stock performance, my response is simple: Vote with your dollars and invest elsewhere, perhaps in the next Tyco or Enron [both enmired in scandal].
[Now back to George Rosen's implied question - What strategy can a free market have for the absence of generosity and the lack of love?
Answer - "Unlike most critics of Capitalism, I believe that as a system of economy it has not had a fair trial. The trial has been long enough, true indeed, but never - with the exception of a few years during the World War[s] - has Capitalism been permitted to function under a chronic 'scarcity of labor.' It has always been forced to operate under a scarcity of job and business opportunity; and, under such conditions, I maintain that Capitalism is under unstable equilibrium. I contend, however, that under a chronic and genuine scarcity of labor, Capitalism is potentially almost an ideal system of economy - that it can secure all and more than Communism has to offer, at the same time that it avoids Communism's major difficulties and evils.... For I believe that our balking, backfiring profits economy can - by injecting one planned adjustment - be made to work in socially desirable ways, and even be made to satisfy high-grade engineering standards of efficiency, with even less involved governmental interference and industrial control than we already have [or than Communism has]." Arthur Dahlberg's Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism (1932, reprinted 1969), pages xii, 23.
[And what is that "one planned adjustment"?]
"I hope to show...
- that it was the retention of long working hours while labor-saving machinery was introduced which necessitated the introduction of..\..newer classes of goods differ[ent] from the old in the spontaneity with which the people with purchasing power demand them,...
- that the failure to shorten the length of the working day is the cause of low wages [and the minimal number of people with plentiful purchasing power, and]
- that this failure is the primary cause of
- our wasteful production,
- our rationing of opportunity,
- our excess industrial plant,
- our enormous wastes of competition,
- our high pressure advertising,
- our economic imperialism,
- and of our commercialistic and pecuniary standards [i.e., the materialism of which we always accused the Communists but of which we are much more guilty than they ever were]" Ibid., pages 27-28.
[In brief, the answer to "What strategy can a free market have for the absence of generosity and the lack of love?" is a strategy of shortening working hours, preferably what Walter Reuther called in 1964, "flexible adjustment of the workweek against unemployment," which is exactly what the Timesizing Program has designed into its Fourth Phase. So we invite George H. Rosen and all others disturbed by the current low standards of free-market capitalism to move from vague and lofty complainings to powerful and specific advocacy of shorter worktime, especially in its most gradual, efficient and market-oriented form, Timesizing. "But won't that cut wages?" No, despite the prevailing spin, wages vary not with productivity but with the supply and demand of labor relative to employment, and worktime reduction reduces the supply of labor relative to demand (ie: employment). "But isn't the unemployment rate fairly low?" Yes, we would need to redefine unemployment to include the whole problem of unsustainability or non-self-support (including welfare, disability, homelessness, prison, forced retirement, forced interrupted retirement, forced part-time, forced self-employment....) which we do in Timesizing Phase One. Any other questions? Email us.]
12/20/2003 How to save the world? - Treat it like a business - Social entrepreneurs are part of a new wave that mixes capitalism with conscience, by Emily Eakin, NYT, A19.
6/23/2003 Downward spiral - Already stumbling, Germany now faces threat of deflation - As prices slide, consumers just wait for a better deal; The Fed watches closely, by Thomas Sims, WSJ, front page, A7.
[More from this article on our downsizing page, 6/21-23/2003 #4-6.]
PFULLENDORF - ...Germany's historic fear of inflation [due to the disastrous hyperinflation of the early 1920s that facilitated Hitler's rise] led it to insist that theEU adopt strict budget rules for countries that join the euro. With Germany [itself] already violating those limits, it has no room to cut taxes [thank God, since US-style taxcuts for the rich try to shortcut directly to boosting financial markets without boosting the job and consumer markets they depent on!] or boost spending. That has helped push the country into a second recession in two years and driven up unemployment to 11%, further weakening consumer confidence.
...The vast safety net than makes workers feel secure is also helping to pull Germany down..\..in the eyes of people such as Mr. Gebert [chairman] of cabinetmaker Alno...: Companies shy away from hiring because regulations make firing difficult even if the economy slumps.
[This articulation is inadequate. We must distinguish between -
- individual firing for cause (necesssary and good) and
- mass layoffs "if the economy slumps" (unnecessary, consumer-base-damaging, and economy-undermining) which must now be handled by trimming the workweek for every employee and conserving employee morale and consumer confidence by maintaining unity and togetherness, instead of chopping jobs (and consumers and markets).]
The federal government in Berlin recently approved a spate of "reforms" [our quotes]...such as cutting the nation's generous unemployment benefits
[which, without nationwide worksharing via fluctuating adjustment of the workweek, mostly downward, will do nothing but worsen the situation by cutting further into the consumption and the consumer base]
and liberalizing restrictions of store-opening hours.
[which will help a little, but if people have no jobs and/or less money, increasing shopping hours won't increase shopping - this is just another impotent attempt at a shortcut, as if the government said, "Let's make all the peripheral and secondary adjustments we can except in the primary problem = the workweek is much too long for our level of efficient, productivity-multiplying technology.]
But it has also flipflopped on taxbreaks.
[Taxbreaks and exports are secondary and even trivial compared to the maintenance of a robust domestic consumer base, meaning consumer (b2c) markets. Even at only 56% of the economy, as in Germany, it is the biggest market sector and the foundation of two of the other markets - the b2b (business-to-business) and financial markets. Without it, they are lost. But the consumer markets today depend critically on the job market, because it is the only source of sustainable consumers and consumption, as opposed to unsustainable makework and cloaked parasitism. And the job market, deprived of its usual "cheats" of makework and labor culling (war, plague, starvation) is entirely dependent on currently implemented worksharing technologies, which in our day are utterly primitive and rudimentary all around the world. The most advanced, gradual and market-oriented is Timesizing.]
So far, he says, the "reforms" [our quotes] have stirred caution, rather than optimism, both among companies and consumers. "In the U.S., there are ups and downs in the economy but there's always light at the end of the tunnel," Mr. Gebert says.
[Except 1929-1940, and the so-called "light" at the end of the tunnel in 1941 was looming world war, to discipline management and centrifuge national income in the worst possible way - by 'culling' (killing and maiming) the labor surplus. And we are heading into the same tunnel again now, thanks to our kneejerk downsizing response to technology = chopping jobs (and consumers) instead of trimming working hours for all.]
"But in Germany, let's face it, we've been in a downturn four, five, six years.
[So much for the irresponsible spin of the professional economists, visible above in the "helped push the country into a second recession in two years." Compare their attempts to cover up the 12-13 year recession-depression in Japan and the 2-3 year recession-depression in the USA.]
"I don't see any perspective where we can say the structural problems will be solved."
[Bingo, a version of The Big Question. And this from an otherwise intelligent top executive in a country to which Japan sent its Labor Minister a couple of years ago to study worksharing systems? There definitely seems to be a 'Gardol shield' between these people's brains and the simple and obvious solution = Walter Reuther's "fluctuating adjustment of the workweek" vs. un- and under-employment. It ain't rocket science.]
12/07/2002 "Paying a price for a shaky economy - Bush's economic policy will get a 'better face' rather than a new face," by Richard Stevenson, NYT, A14.
[So the obvious question: What would a new face for Bush's economic policy look like? Or nevermind just a superficial new 'face,' what would a completely adequate new policy look like? It would look very much like the Timesizing overtime-to-training&hiring conversion and technology-(via-comprehensive-unemployment-) adjusted workweek program. And here's another version of The Big Question today -]
"Lilita [Elisa Carrio] isn't the new Evita, but she admires her," by Larry Rohter, NYT, A4.
"Argentina needs new political and economic institutions, because the ruling class is spent." Elisa Carrio (photo caption)
[Ditto the USA and the world. So the 'only' question is, what would those new political and economic institutions look like? How would they be designed?]
11/30/2002 Does Schroeder have political capital to reform economy? - Another German recession could infect the rest of the continent, by Mark Landler, NYT, A3.
...Unemployment [in November] stands at a 4-year high of about 4m people [9.7%]..\.. "I haven't seen a situation this bad in my 25 years in political life," said Oswald Metzger, an expert on budget issues for the Greens.... "The government is offering no long-term vision of how we are going to emerge from this period."...
[Sounds like a version of The Big Question. However, what the NYT-WSJ-IMF-mainstream means by "reform" - "make it easier for companies to hire and fire workers" - means "easier to fire" and "easier to hire at lower pay," a formula for weaker consumer markets and deeper recession. Despite the strength of the union-based 35-hr workweek movement in Germany, they still don't have a clue about the worksharing/timesizing imperative.]
11/06/2002 Unsettling scenario - Inside the Fed, deflation draws a closer look - Stumped for a cure, officials study how to keep prices from falling in first place, by Greg Ip, WSJ, front page.
[Whoah, the Fed is verging on posing The Big Question. Their version: How to keep prices from falling in the first place? Maintain consumer demand. How maintain consumer demand? Prevent the centripetal forces on national income from overwhelming the centrifugal forces, because we've allowed spending power to concentrate in unspendably massive "black holes" in the top income brackets. How to maintain the strength of the centrifugal forces? Either ban corporate mergers and downsizings except in pre-liquidation extremis, or flex up the 62-year-frozen workweek and let it vary inversely with unemployment, comprehensively defined (ie: to include welfare, disability, homelessness, prison, premature retirement....) - AND implement automatic overtime- and overwork-conversion to training&hiring. Simple. And the only alternative is war or plague to withdraw the wage-depressing general surplus of manhours from the job market. It's Malthus' legendary "general glut" - it's real after all. Its solution is to share the vanishing work and quit straining for makework and quit chanting that "technology creates more work than it destroys." Chanting doesn't make it true.]
9/20/2002 The vision thing - Like father, like son, by Paul Krugman, NYT, A29.
This is the way the recovery ends - not with a bang but...a whimper.
...Right now it looks as if the economy is stalling and also as if the people in charge have no idea what to do.
[This could be a version of The Big Question right here - and Krugman has no idea what to do either. His economics, uninformed by worktime economics, is as shallow as the rest.]
In short, it's feeling a lot like the early 1990's.
[Or for that matter, like 1929.]
It doesn't really matter whether you call what's going on right now a slow recovery or a recession. Most people don't care whether GDP growth is slightly above or below zero; what matters to them is whether they can find jobs and keep them.
And the job situation is increasingly dismal. A 5.7% unemployment rate doesn't sound that bad, but -
- an unusually large number of workers have given up searching for jobs.
- The overall unemployment rate doesn't reflect the rapidly growing number of people who are truly desperate, because they have been out of work for six months or more.
- And the employment situation has lately taken a significant turn for the worse: the number of people filing new claims for unemployment insurance, a leading indicator of future unemployment, has increased sharply over the past month....
Should we be worried about the administration's lack of the vision thing when it comes to economics?
[Again the Big Question.]
Yes, we should. The excesses of the 1990s dwarfed those of the 1980s....
[And Krugman is blissfully unaware of the cumulative buildup of surplus manhours in - or "beside" - the job market over the last 30 years as waves of efficient technology were injected into the economy. This is the real, deep-structure problem, solvable only by a major MAJOR war (the stupid way), or by designing and implementing a system such as timesizing to share the vanishing human employment and spread the concentrating income of the nation (the intelligent way).]
12/17/2001 Understanding globalism - One world, after all, by Michael Elliott, Time Magazine, 68-69.
[In the midst of an article that tries unsuccessfully to explain the hullaballoo over Hardt & Negri's book, Empire, we find this articulation of The Big Question -]
...Hardt and Negri...show...that both [the pro and anti globalization] sides are right, yet both...miss the point. Globalization is a phenomenon with revolutionary, liberating potential - but in the process, it can crush the spirit of those for whom changes in social and economic structures are deeply disturbing. The trick is to find structures that preserve the economic gains of globalization without becoming just other forms of colonialism....
[This "trick" or challenge has two requirements. (1) It must prevent globalization from being just another powerful mechanism for concentrating income and wealth, thus making the world's problems worse, and (2) it must be at once defined and enforceable, yet at such a general level that non-mutually-interfering political and historical and geographic and social and cultural diversity is not only preserved but stimulated. Timesizing.com's program to set and enforce an upper limit on unaccountably remunerable employment (overtime) and adjust it downward if unemployment moves upward (or v.v.) provide one set of structures that satisfy the requirements of this challenge.]
7/24/99 How real is the new economy? Cover headline, The Economist, 2 stories:
- How real is the new economy? - Careful of that shifting paradigm, The Economist, 17.
[The chief flaw of both these stories is the easy assumption that there's no employment problem because the standard superficial official unemployment rate is only twice as much as would have been regarded as alarming in 1945 (anything over 2%). Conventional economists and the politicians and CEO's they serve don't see a problem because they don't want to see a problem. But disability, homelessness, prisons are all up and the only reason welfare isn't up is because of the recent fad of reducing it by fiat.]
...With luck the IT revolution will be everything its most zealous prophets claim, and mankind is on the verge of a leap forward as great as the one it made between the late 1800s and the middle of this century.
["With luck"?! All information technology can do for us is monitor our deterioriation better - IF we choose to let it, which so far we haven't. "Luck" is not going to accomplish a leap forward. That takes will, which we don't have, and design, which Timesizing has, but it's no good without will. The irony here is that we still have not implemented the most basic design that would enable us to make positive use of the 1880s-1950s "leap forward" and it is that failure that is allowing its expanding negative outcome. In short, expanding work-saving technology implies less work for all, and we passed up the primitive version of that positive outcome, the 30-hour workweek of 1933, so we are left with its opposite, no work for some, and some more, and some more. Thus the 1880s-1950s "leap forward" was superficial - so far.]
Short of that [great leap forward] is a more plausible wish: that today's far-reaching changes in the way business is done will soon lift the trend of growth in productivity across the economy as a whole [from just computer manufacturing]. Even this [more plausible wish], a bit less than a miracle, would be a wonderful prize.
[This may be more plausible but it's no "wonderful prize" because it's no less superficial than the previous wish. The lesson of the Great Depression is still unlearned: What good is productivity without demand, and how can you get demand when so much spending power is concentrated among so few that they wouldn't have time to spend it in hundreds of lifetimes? And we've now gone from speaking of luck to speaking of a miracle. When are we going to get to DESIGN and cut the uncertainty factor?]
But the puzzling fact is, it does not appear to have happened yet.
[What's so puzzling about a miracle not having happened yet? And these Economist editors are supposedly intelligent lifeforms??]
As John Maynard Keynes might have said: "When the facts are unclear, I keep an open mind. What do you do, sir?"
[Well, we don't think the Economist keeps an open mind. They still trot out the faith-based Lump of Labour Fallacy to condemn without trial the correct general direction for any possible "great leap forward." They have anything but an open mind in practice. But at least here we have the big open question from their lips in theory and in print, even if they had to imagine it on the lips of their great theorist Keynes in order to spit it out. Too bad Keynes and his mentor Marshall were so exclusively theorists. If they'd listened to the historians, like Cunningham, they might have stumbled on using worktime as a control variable instead of totally ignoring it on the working assumptions (false) that it's trivial and/or a constant.]
- The new economy - Work in progress: On the surface, America's economy is changing dramatically - that much is plain. But just how deep the changes go, and what they imply for the country's growth in the long term, remains an open question, The Economist, 21.
...Perhaps it is still a question of waiting for the statistics to catch up with reality....
[And then waiting for the will dba willingness to share the gravy and do something about the statistics.]
...The question, however, is whether [the 0.5% improvement in the US GDP growthrate due solely to computer manufacturing] can be sustained.
[How can it, when most of it goes unused now anyway? As usual, the cartoon on the page (24) has a lot more sense than the text. It shows computers, undoubtedly with vast "quality-adjusted output," being used for downloading games, emailing friends, browsing fall fashions and porn. In short, for trivia.]
This [sustained high productivity in PC making] seems likely only if big productivity improvements begin to migrate from the centre of the high-tech industry to the rest of the economy.
[Well, this has begun but as we said, productivity without purchasers is pointless.]
The fact remains, the issue is not yet settled.
[More important, at least for the Economist, the issue is not yet well articulated. And who are we kidding with all this obsession about productivity? All CEOs today care about is short-term stock price, and they'll do anything to the longer term prospects of their company to get it, including clobber productivity, e.g., by repeated "last rounds" of demoralizing downsizing.]
4/10/99 Desperately seeking a perfect model - America is widely held to be a clear winner in the world's economic beauty contest. But have the judges really studied the figures? The Economist, p.67.
...The single best measure of economic performance is growth in GDP per head....
[We disagree (especially when they start equating GDP per capita to living standards despite all the bad stuff that the GDP measure counts as positive). It's the comprehensive under-employment rate consisting of the unemployed, those on welfare, disabled, homeless, prisons, forced part time, forced self employment.... Anyhow, you Economist editors "are entitled to your own wrong opinion." Let's see what you do with it.]
..\..growth in GDP per head...has averaged 1.6% in America over the past decade, exactly the same as Japan, and less than in Germany....
[In other words, America's model is not so hot, despite the chest-thumping.]
10/5/98 ... The International Monetary Fund said yesterday the global economic outlook has "worsened considerably" since April, but it ended a day of discussions on the subject by papering over disagreements on how to halt the crisis. (AP via Boston Globe, p. D4.)
10/5/98 "The truth is, nobody knows what the one true path is...," Paul Krugman, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has become a leading thinker on the crisis, said in a speech Saturday. (From article "World financial leaders meet, swap far-reaching ideas" by Aaron Zitner in Boston Globe, D4.)
[Question - how can this guy be a "leading thinker" on the crisis if he doesn't even know one workable solution? It's standard for "experts" to assume, that because they don't have an answer, nobody does.
Phil Hyde challenges Krugman and his crowd to set up a prize similar to the Longitude Prize in Britain in the 18th Century, for solving this crisis. Let's see, 20,000 pounds sterling in 1714 is equivalent to at least $2,000,000 today. Then Phil will demonstrate that Timesizing constitutes a short- and mid-term solution as the first in a series of modules of a very long-term solution. He will demonstrate it in theory, and also in practice at any level of any willing national economy in the world (international will take longer). France is already demonstrating a primitive form of Phil's solution which, even so, has made it the most recession-resistant economy in the world (with the possible exception of self-sufficient and depreciated-dollar Australia in early 2002 - see 3/06/2002 #1).
Other potential contestants for this prize:
- *Thomas "Cool" Colignatus, Netherlands
- Guy Dauncey's *Earth Future website
- *Global Scenario Group (alias Stockholm Environment Institute of Boston?)
- Russell Doane spoke at the Ethical Society at Longy School in Cambridge, Mass., USA on Feb. 16, 1997 on "Social Engineering: Why it has a bad name, and how to do it right," and here's a more recent *essay by Russell Doane on the Ethical Society's website. The Ethical Society's blurb for Doane states, "Doane has been an engineer since 1958. He has led over 60 groups in making wall-size displays. Eyes see the whole. Disparate people co-create. But in public life, we still limit ourselves to words, as if we were ancient Greeks. Try to design some social systems that way, and we sink to frustrated name calling. It's time to learn democratic diagrammery."
[Ohoh, sounds like a lot of overhead, like Arthur Dahlberg's elaborate pipe diagrams of the economy in his "Jobs, Machines and Capitalism" (1932), or Philippe Crabbé's course-long tour of systems theory in his Economic System Design course at the University of Ottawa (2005-07), where he never gets around to defining the minimum core of the economy that needs redesign, let alone the minimum necessary redesign.]
- *International Forum on Globalization of San Francisco has good sustainable- and economic-design talk but is currently focused mainly on plugging leaks in free trade rather than redesigning the leaky core of the global economy itself – see their full-page ad in the New York Times, 11/20/98, p.C7.
- Bill McKibben, *Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2007)
- David Callahan, *The Moral Center - How We Can Reclaim Our Country from Die-Hard Extremists, Rogue Corporations, Hollywood Hacks, and Pretend Patriots (2006)
- Martin Carnoy and Derek Shearer, Economic Democracy - The Challenge of the 1980s (1980) - or the challenge of the next century? - or the next three centuries?! And wasn't this "economic democracy" phrase frequently on the lips of Jane Fonda's first spouse Tom Hayden? Irving Bluestone's squib on the back cover says, "Economic Democracy is a timely challenge to the tired economic theories and concepts of our capitalistic system." Setting up direct democracy to serve the economy in ways that market forces can't handle (like defining the market) is the function of Phase One of the Timesizing program.
There is actually a huge number of books with this title (Amazon.com search 3/30/2007 from only first 2.1 pages of search returns):
Economic Democracy: A Blueprint/Grand Strategy for World Peace and Prosperity, by J.W. Smith (2006)
Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st Century, by J.W. Smith (2005)
Economic Democracy: Ending the Corporate Domination of Our Lives, by Scott J. Raskiewicz (2001)
Economic Democracy: The Politics of Feasible Socialism, by Robin Archer (1999)
Economic Democracy and Financial Participation: A Comparative Study, by Daryl D'Art (1992)
Economic Democracy: The Political Economy of Self-management and Participation, by Donald George (1992)
Economic Democracy: Workers' Participation in Chilean Industry - Studies in Social Discontinuity, by Juan G. Espinosa and Andrew Zimbalist (1978)
Economic Democracy & Private Enterprise, by Michael Oshaughnessy (1945)
Economic Democracy, by Lega Democratica Nazionale (1943)
Economic Democracy, America's Answer to Socialism & Communism: A Collection of Articles, Addresses and Papers, by Robert S. Brookings (1929)
Whoa, this looks like a groundswell, a real cri de coeur! Our instinct to put this in Timesizing's Phase One looks well supported! Here are a few variations on the theme:
Socio-Economic Democracy and the World Government: Collective Capitalism, Depovertization, Human Rights, Template for Sustainable Peace, by Dhanjoo N. Ghista (2004)
The Origins of Economic Democracy: Profit Sharing and Employee Shareholding Schemes, by Michael Poole (1989)
A Preface to Economic Democracy by Robert H. Dahl (1986)
Towards economic democracy in the Netherlands Indies, by George Henry Charles Hart (1943)
The Struggle for Economic Democracy in Sweden, by Gregg M. Olsen (1992)
An Analysis of the Economic Democracy Reforms in Sweden (Mellen Studies in Economics, V. 22), by Philip Whyman
And here's a sample with "economic democracy" in the subtitle:
Own your own job: Economic democracy for working Americans, by Jeremy Rifkin (1977)
Effort and Energy in Temprian: Economic Democracy, by App Applegate (2001)
The neighborhood cooperative: Economic democracy in low-income communities, by Rodney S Wead (1983)
The Education-Jobs Gap: Underemployment or Economic Democracy, by D. W. Livingstone (1999)
Our Postwar Society - A Long-term View - IPR Education Economics Democracy, by Arnold J Zurcher (1944)
Economic Policy in Postwar Japan: Growth Versus Economic Democracy, by Kozo Yamamura (1967)
10/2/98 Russian Premier's Calming Words: He Has No Economic Plan - Russians are worried that the Kremlin's cure might be worse than the disease, by Michael Gordon, New York Times, 3.
8/23/97 The puzzling failure of economics, The Economist magazine, cover article (p.11).
...Bad policies based on bad economics...remain too numerous to mention.... Why has economics not done better?... (1) Economists...remain silent about the underlying ideas that unite them ../.. the role of prices and markets, the basic principles of microeconomics ../.. [and] talk loudest about the things they understand least well.
[And some of their most basic principles they fail to apply to some of the most basic areas; for example, the principle of marginalism they apply only to prices and never, no never, to the marginal utility of concentrated employment, income and wealth.]
(2) They are...quick to point out...market failure; they are...slower to ask whether the supposed remedy of government intervention might not...be worse.
[The Economist is sooo simplistic, so black&white in its trapped-in-the-box thinking on this: no government intervention GOOD, any and all government intervention BAD. The real failure is that neither economists nor The Economist magazine asks whether there might in fact be TWO kinds of government intervention, one good and one bad. Good - a stable minimum of liberating generalized centrally-positioned controls, i.e., a few basic groundrules, ideally just one - looking at markets from the perspective of game theory, there are no games that completely lack rules. Bad - a burgeoning maximum of stifling detailed off-center controls, i.e., hobbling bureaucracy and wrap-around red tape. See the neglected key to small government.]
1993 - As Walter Kerr once wrote, 'Isn't it odd that a century which should, by all rights, be the most leisurely in all history is...the fastest [ie: busiest]?' ...Not very much effort has been devoted to formally thinking through the problems of mixing consumption and time to maximize happiness, what Schlomo Maital calls 'the King Kong of social science questions.' ...John Maynard Keynes...foresaw the possibility of a world in which...the problem would be 'to spread the bread thin on the butter - to make what work there is still to be done...as widely shared as possible.' (From David Warsh's Economic Principals, 1993, p. 389.)
1992 - Problem diagnosed but solution eludes writers, a review of Robert Monks & Nell Minow's book, Power and Accountability - "A provocative answer to anyone alarmed by Barbarians at the Gate" (HarperBusiness, 1992), on p.36, Boston Globe, 5/31/92.
This book offers a long indictment of large US corporations that have misused power and have made a mockery of accountability. Trouble is, [the] authors...writing as shareholder surrogates..\..provide only a short list of possible corrective measures, all of which can be labeled, "items for further discussion and study." In short, they have successfully diagnosed what's wrong with the patient...but [despite the quote on the cover] are unsure about what to prescribe. [They contend] that institutional shareholders, by virture of their sheer numbers, have the power [but not, perhaps, the long-term ownership incentive, ed.] to make public companies more responsible and accountable.... But the unanswered question is: What will make institutional investors fully use their clout by challenging companies' actions?
[As perhaps a long minimum-term stock-holding requirement would do to discourage bailout, churn and speculation? As long as investors dba speculators have the impression they can instantly bail and run for safety into some other momentarily rising or slower-slipping stock, the overall effect of their ongoing accumulation will be an ongoing conversion of much-needed spending power into more and more wasted investing power, and an overall weakening of the entire system affected by their dumb parasitism. A black hole in astronomy may or may not be powerful, but a black-hole economy gets weaker and weaker.]
The authors...propose that "a presidential corporate task force" be convened, and that the SEC "reform proxy rules" so that more collective action can be taken by shareholder groups. Yet, early on, [they] observe that federal and state governments have, for the most part, rallied around big business, to the detriment of shareholders....
[Once again, the problem is the hyperconcentration of power at the expense of feedback - ergo, no system sustainability. The second, longer quote on the cover is -]
"Corporations determine far more than any other institution the air we breathe, the quality of the water we drink, even where we live. Yet they are not accountable to anyone."
[This is the lethal flaw in the unlimited concentration of value and power over the long term - the power elite insulate and isolate themselves; they direct more and more of the money flows to themselves and beggar their consumer base, which shrinks the markets for the productivity in which they need to invest. Thus they beggar their own investments - and diminish themselves and their own survivability. Systems they parasitize begin losing competitions with other systems that have more feedback, flexibility, and adaptibility.]
1988 - Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking - Soviet and Western Scholars Issue a Challenge to Build a World Beyond War (Walker & Co.: New York, 1988).
[All it takes is a slight labor shortage engineered by workweek reduction, so market forces can automatically centrifuge the national income and get it out of "storage" in the top brackets and into the hands of middle- and lower-income people who spend it immediately, thus obviating the need to create said labor shortage by actually killing portions of the workforce. In other words, solve unemployment by other than military means (eg: Timesizing) and you've disincentivized war.]
1984 - Now, few people in power dare to believe that economic recovery will come easily or be sustained. And many of them are taking measures, not to lighten the economic prospect, but to adjust their eyes to the dark [ie: to lower their expectations and keep going by shouting or manufacturing smaller good news and whispering or ignoring bigger bad news].
We must, it seems, accept as inevitable [with today's overwhelmed $centrifuge mechanisms] the violent polarization of wealth and poverty, power and vulnerability, between a minority and majority of states in the world, and between a minority and majority of states in the world [or at least in the US and the UK]....
...There has been a conspicuous withdrawal from the essentially optimistic political and personal liberalism that flourished in the 1960s and early 1970s, to the bunkers of moral and social disciplinarianism; along with an undeniable spread and intensification of cynicism and apathy.
These manifestations of despair are neither superficial nor capricious. They take sustenance from 3 mounting threats to the well-being and even survival of humanity: ...nuclear war by accident or design, ...environmental damage, ...the pressure of rapidly increasing human redundancy [ie: layoffs], which is denying to so many 100m's any participation in productive material or cultural activity and turning them into mere [over-]population statistics.
...What this atlas ultimately identifies is the clear and consistent irrelevance of conventional solutions to the problems gathering in the world of sovereign states. For increasing numbers of people, such problems...point to a crisis not only within the system, but of the system itself.
It is a crisis that can be creatively resolved, in our view, only by a different organization for humanity. (From Michael Kidron's & Ronald Segal's New State of the World Atlas, Simon & Schuster's Pluto Press, 1984, pp. v-vi.)
1977 - We reflect that, two hundred years after Adam Smith, economists have achieved not the control of inflation, not the prevention of unemployment, but the ability to have both at the same time. (From John Kenneth Galbraith's The Age of Uncertainty, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1977, p. 324.)
1974 - Adam Smith, Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, and other great economists in history gather round an empty chair for the economic theorist who can explain simultaneously rising inflation and unemployment, which were supposed to be on a seesaw rather than in the same rocket ship. (Cover illustration in Psychology Today, fall (Sept?) 1974 issue.)
[Maverick Jane Jacobs gives a gigantic clue at the beginning of one of her books in the 1980s when she observes that "stagflation" (simultaneously rising inflation and unemployment) is absolutely standard in third-world countries with no middle class.]
1967 - Speaking out - Our students have no Utopia, by Pres. Buell Gallagher of City College (CCNY) of NY, 5/06/1967 Saturday Evening Post, page 8.
[You mean a rehash of the New Deal and a relapse into warring on smaller nations doesn't suffice??]
Today's college rebels are a new breed.... This college generation has grown up under circumstances that make it far too difficult to hold high hopes and dream great dreams. They have no Utopia. And without a Utopia, they can can do little more than withdraw from life or else lash out in frustration against what they consider the follies of the people who seem to run the world.
Thus, when the rebels accuse and attack and become suffused in what they call alienation, they are expressing thoughts and attitudes which many of their classmates share, whether consciously or not. A couple of years ago, at the height of the Free Speech Movement, the rebels were saying, "Don't trust anybody over thirty."
The rebels of 1967 regard this as a trap whereby the "older" group, the ones who are now 25-30, recruited undergraduates for their rebellion. So now [the "younger" group] says, "Don't trust anybody but ourselves." And who are we? Just ourselves, against the world, especially against The Establishment.
Led by its alienated minority, the under-25 generation speaks like this: "If there is to be an authority, let it be the vote of myself and my peers on this issue at this moment.
[Ah, such existentialism! Hence the importance of direct democracy within Timesizing in areas outside the capability of market forces (such as defining the market itself, including gating and pacing the whole solution process.) ]
Do not tell us [that] the patterns of history have prescribed for us...your rules and regulations. We have seen what you have done with your chance to make a viable world - and it stinks."
Rejecting all authority, the rebel at CCNY, at Berkeley, at the other schools, is quite ready to change the rules of the game at the drop of an issue, and if the rules don't change quickly enough, he is prepared to disobey them....
- One alarming aspect of current rebellion is its disregard of the consequences of illegality.
[Disregard of consequences is existentialism, combined with illegality it here receives a more dramatic name -]
In essence, this is anarchy. - A second disquieting feature is the assumed power of arrogance [huh??]. I say "assumed," because experience [shows] that when a struggle for rights is defeated, rites are substituted.
[Very neat, and often true, in many areas. Back to colleges -]
The principal ritual is the demonstration: picketing, mass meeting, sit-in, lie-in, walk-out, teach-in. It brings no tangible results, but it "tells them."
[Hey, it's better than terrorism!]
The press proves compliant: Confrontation is news, dialogue is not, and when a call for a demonstration goes unheeded, it also goes unreported.
[In summer 2004, the largest demonstrations go unreported, and the press is compliant only to The Establishment. What option does that leave?]
I come now to the most difficult part of this story. ...The real tragedy of today's college rebels...is that they have no bona fide tragedy of their own and no willingness to learn about the subject from older generations.
[Wrong. '60s rebel Phil Hyde of Timesizing.com had the suicides of his father and grandfather in 1955 and his willingness to learn from older generations is demonstrated by this page, the item on Reuther immediately below for instance, and the bibliography.... One of Phil's great older-generation heroes during the 1960s was Buckminster Fuller.]
This all has a drastic side effect, for without tragedy [of their own?!] there can be no compelling hope - no Utopia.
[Ah, we don't know if we agree with this, but we know where he's comin' from - someplace close to Kahlil Gibran's "your joy is the filling of the space carved out by your sorrow" (paraphrase).]
Having nothing to die for, they have nothing to live for.
[A well-designed worksharing system like Timesizing is something to live for (top priority of a survivor of parental suicides), and to live for.]
...In contrast, this college generation is by and large the most fortunate offspring of the richest nation on earth,
[sounds like Buell, exhausted, wants to rest on his generation's laurels, instead of designing a nation that automatically adjusts to, and keeps up with, rising expectations, like Timesizing and its successors - but then, that would require welcoming suggestions and criticisms, and Buell is into pontificating against them -]
many of them spared too long from adult burdens.
But there is another factor. All their lives they have been told that they face dire threats - nuclear bombs, for instance - about which they can do nothing except tremble or yell.
[So they're yelling - good point!]
They were alienated by their advantages and their impotence long before they came to realize it....
[Sort of like the Eloi of H.G.Wells' Time Machine.]
Against this background, in a world as messy as ours in 1967, the rebels' idealism soon sours into cynicism and then frustration - and then negativism.
[- for example, into a highly active crap detector?]
...It is one thing to condemn the world one's fathers [and mothers] have made, and something else to seek a superior alternative.... It is one thing to tell a college president [like myself] that they rules are too restrictive, and another to tell him which rules should be imposed so that the school [or world?] can improve its work and provide students a better education [or citizens a better life?!]...
[Well, lurking behind the scrim of this website, like the Wizard behind the screen in the palace of Oz, is a radical of the 60s who got fed up with both capitalism and socialism, developed such an active crap detector that he finally decided if he wanted it done right, he'd have to do it himself. So he set forth on an economic design project, with Bucky Fuller (eg: Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Utopia or Oblivion) as background support and MIT's Limits to Growth as immediate goad, and redesigned the core of the body economic to automatically provide full employment with no runaway inflation, and then a series of similarly structured programs riding off into the future to accommodate constantly rising expectations.]
1965 - Walter Reuther "thinks labor must do more for civil rights....
His second campaign is to improve working working conditions in the plants....
Reuther's third concern is to cut unemployment and the threat of automation.
In 1963, UAW members had 162,700 fewer jobs than a decade earlier, even though production had increased by 1.8m vehicles.
[Here we have a compelling counter-example to the common myth that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys" - which - we're always asked to accept on faith - is happening somewhere else, someplace where the mass downsizing right in front of us is not happening.]
Reuther opposes make-work. "I don't think you can morally defend featherbedding, but it's not enough to condemn it," he says. "Featherbedding is a defense mechanism, just like the 35-hour-workweek demand. As long as there is not full employment, you will have workers trying to protect their jobs. We have got to meet this problem, and we haven't. This is the basic unresolved problem."
[Interesting that Reuther seems to put the make-work bandaid on the same level as the share-work solution of shorter workweeks, especially when he hurdled one of the major design obstacles of share-work three years earlier at the UAW Convention in Atlantic City with his concept of "fluctuating adjustment of the workweek" against unemployment.]
The only solution, he believes, is to create more jobs.
[Ohoh, this sounds like the make-work bandaid he claimed to oppose.]
"Every five weeks, for the next decade, we have to create a new General Motors Corp. - 400,000 jobs every five weeks just to stand still."
[An interesting figure in 1965, when Reuther was considering only the inroads of efficient technology and the modest immigration rates of the time (c. 200,000 annually) when its near counterpart today has been spinmeistered down to 250,000 a month; then 200,000; and now 150,000 a month just to keep up with population growth, at a time when we have not only the continuing inroads of efficient technology, but also over a million immigrants a year, plus thousands of offshore outsourcings.]
Men not needed on the factory lines, he argues, should be put to work filling the nation's needs for more schools and teachers, better roads, more hospitals. Reuther adds, "The time to have a shorter workweek is when we've met all these needs." (P.92 in 8/10/1965 Look Magazine, from article, "How tough is Walter Reuther?" by J. Robert Moskin, p.83ff.)
[Reuther's examples here sound mostly like government projects, which in turn sound like echoes of the CCC, the WPA, or any of the other makework programs of the New Deal thirty years earlier. The problems with the approach he's advocating here - worksharing as a last resort - is first, how do we define the limits of these needs for schools, teachers, roads and hospitals in a such way that we will ever agree that these needs have been met, and secondly, how do we get the money and power to make our political "representatives" even begin to consider developing makework creation on this scale when the continuing inroads of efficient technology have devalued us as part of a huge and growing, though possibly much disguised, labor surplus? This "makework before sharework" or "makework first" approach is basically the same position as Rexford Tugwell took in "The Industrial Discipline" of 1933 to rebut Arthur Dahlberg's recommended 20-hour workweek in "Jobs, Machines and Capitalism" of 1932. How ironic that the inventor (as far as we know) of one of the key design components of practical worksharing (fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against unemployment) should cave in to Tugwell's position three decades later! Well, with the failure of Reuther's "makework first" advocacy of the 1960s to add to the failure of Tugwell's implemented "makework first" policy in the 1930s, it's time we learned the lesson and switched to share-work first by working to implement a system that guarantees full employment via automatically fluctuating adjustment of the workweek.]
c.1939 (or 1946?) - Henry Ford, "Let's see you unionize these robots!" Walter Reuther, "Let's see you sell them cars."
(Semi-apocryphal anecdote reported to Phil Hyde by friend of Reuther's daughter in 1996 in north Cambridge, Mass. antique shop, c.1996.)
1934 - Ninety percent of our people live on salary or wages, ten percent on profits alone....People in this country whose income is less than two thousand a year, buy more than two-thirds of all goods sold....If these people are not assured of an income, the goods produced cannot be sold.
Nor can the jobs involved in producing the goods be maintained.
(FDR quote from p.316, Will Rogers - A Biography by Donald Day, published by David McKay: New York, 1962.)
1933 - Nearly all utopias and social panaceas assume, for their proper working, that the nature of man, subjected to a gentler environment, would at once change for the better. (P. 70.)
In the capitalist system, no method exists for distributing goods to the large [disadvantaged] class which possesses no capital except by making other goods and thereby receiving [bare-subsistence] wages.... To save capitalism, it is [currently] necessary to find some territory to which America can again donate a share of its goods [via foreign "trade," i.e., trade deficit], not superfluous goods, but the goods it does not know how to distribute [to its own disadvantaged citizens]. (P. 88-90.)
(From Harold Loeb's Life in a Technocracy - What It Might Be Like, Syracuse University Press, 1996, first published 1933.)
1920 - But the strange mystery, the secret that lies concealed within [the] organization of..\..the age of machinery...is realized by but a few. It offers, to those who see it aright, the most perplexing industrial paradox ever presented in the history of mankind. With all our wealth, we are still poor. After a century and a half of labor-saving machinery, we work about as hard as ever. With a power [to work] multiplied a hundred fold, [work] still conquers us. And more than this. There are many senses in which the machine age seems to leave the great bulk of civilized humanity, the working part of it, worse off instead of better.
(From Stephen Leacock's The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, John Lane Company, 1920, p. 22-23. Leacock is Canada's Mark Twain - even looked like Twain. His masterpiece was "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town," especially the sketch entitled "The Sinking of the Mariposa Belle." Leacock, was, "incidentally," on the faculty of the economics dept. at McGill. He died in the 1940s.)
[The answer is obviously that we misuse technology to replace employees instead of making their jobs easier - we cut jobs instead of cutting working hours. In groping for an answer, Leacock stumbles on the critical time dimension on p. 147 -]
Ten hours a day of mechanical task is too long: nine hours is too long: eight hours is too long. I am not raising here the question as to how and to what extent the eight hours can be shortened, but only urging the primary need of recognizing that a working day of eight hours is too long for the full and proper development of human capacity and for the rational enjoyment of life.
[When he does "raise the question as to how and to what extent the eight hours can be shortened," he makes an immediate breakthrough by realizing the superiority of continuously adjusting reductions rather than one or more rigid ones (p. 149f) -]
But the process can be continuous. The short hours achieved with acclamation to-day will later be denounced as the long hours of to-morrow.
[He even answers the objections of nervous employers who fear some kind of loss from the process (p. 150) -]
The essential point to grasp, however, is that society at large has nothing to lose by the process. The shortened hours become a part of the framework of production. It adapts itself to it. Hitherto we have been caught in the running of our own machine: it is time that we altered the gearing of it.
[He errs only in failing to see the centrality and comprehensiveness of the time dimension and the shorter hours solution, placing it on an equal footing with other ideas such as the minimum wage. In our ignorance and inexperience, our cruel fate in the 1930s lay in selecting the wrong idea, the minimum wage, and spending the rest of the century losing ground with it. If we had selected shorter hours (a per-person market-framework balancer rather than a per-job market-activity rigidifier), we would by now have had both leisure and higher wages, and a stable stock market due to a solid consumer base on the same scale as our concentrated capital base for investment. As it is, our consumer base is now a tiny fraction of what it should be to take up all our technology-amplified output, and our capital base is bloated beyond imagination with unbalanced wealth concentration, just as in 1928. Here we go again. We failed to get it right last time. Let's not blow it this time. Nuclear weapons make it too suicidal to use our previous total war solution.]
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