Summary

This document outlines proposed solutions to many of the social and economic problems confronting this nation, and, for that matter, the rest of the world.

The premises of this document are:

• Economic competition is counterproductive.

• Profit, money and its other surrogates are less effective motivators than self-actualization.

• Economic growth will eventually lead to economic catastrophe.

• The idea that a person must work to earn a living is obsolete and should be abandoned.

• A cooperative (as distinguished from competitive) society, coupled with responsible behavior on the part of the individuals comprising the society, will improve the quality of life for current and future generations.

Introduction

Some of you may have noticed that there are big problems with our national and global economies. These problems include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• Nationally
  • More people are poor and/or homeless now than in recent memory if not in our entire national history.

  • The average wage has been falling for the past twenty years or more.

  • More and more companies are downsizing, resulting both in experienced workers being laid off and fewer jobs for young workers.

  • More of the nation's wealth is controlled by fewer people (on a percentage basis) than ever before in the nation's history.

  • To a greater extent than in recent memory there is enmity and even violence among and between numerous identifiable sects or factions. In addition to the traditional divisions based on color, religion, nationality and sex, there are increasingly many distinctions based on age, sexual preference, and "class", as well as newly identified subdivisions within historical groups.

  • There are more people in prison now then ever before in the nation's history, and crime rates are at or near all-time highs.

  • Increasingly, the connection between the rewards that a worker receives and the quality and quantity of work that he produces is diminishing. This derives largely from various government-instituted programs that base rewards and employability more on the groups to which a person is considered to belong rather than to the person's knowledge, skills, abilities and performance, and to unionization and its equivalent in recent labor laws that (a) base job-related rewards (tenure, wage-rate, benefits, etc.), on longevity rather than on performance, and (b) have severely restricted the employer's ability to replace less competent workers with those who are better performers.

  • Partially as a result of this disconnection, customer service and quality of workmanship are, with a few exceptions, universally in decline; and most of the exceptions derive from the fact of increasing automation, rather than the care lavished on the work by employees.

  
  

• Globally
  • We are consuming our renewable resources faster than they can renew themselves.

  • There are the usual number of civil and international wars.

That these things are happening is an inevitable consequence of three distinct but related problems:

• The competitive structure of our global and national economies.

• Human greed and ambition.

• Human beings who have been raised in environments not conducive to good mental health.

Each of these three factors reinforces the other.

Competition: Solution or Cause?

Some people espouse competition as a solution to many of our economic and social problems. The alternatives to competition, as they see it, are monopoly or government regulation. Their idea is that competition results in better products, greater efficiency, and lower costs than would be the case under either a monopoly or a regulated economy. There are at least two critical flaws in these conclusions by competition's proponents.

• There is a third option to competition that they do not appear to have considered; namely, cooperation.

• Competitive processes are intrinsically less efficient than cooperative ones, because competitive processes:
  • necessitate superfluous duplication of function, and
  • incur unnecessary costs associated with the promotion (e.g., advertising) of products or services.

Human Greed, Ambition, and Survival

Competition by itself might not be disastrous. If a competitive organization established an income goal, and then ceased expanding when that goal had been achieved, many of the problems listed above could be forestalled or reduced in severity, if not altogether avoided.

But the mind-set of our economy is that there is no such thing as "enough" income, "enough" profit, "enough" growth. The combination of competition and greed/ambition results in a push for continuing growth, each organization striving to increase or create the market for its wares; and to maximize its penetration into that market. If an organization is successful in accomplishing these goals, it will eventually dominate the market for its services, resulting in a monopoly, which, of course, is antithetical to the concept of competition. But that's beside the point of this discussion. The point here is that implicit in competition is the demand for growth. And implicit in the demand for growth are:

• the demand for more people (i.e., consumers) to fuel the growth;

• the need to consume non-renewal resources at an increasing rate;

• the need to consume renewable resources, in many cases at a rate that will inevitably exceed the rate of renewal.

Competition Is Ultimately Self-Defeating

Also implicit in competition is the need to reduce costs, one major component of which is human resources, namely employees.

Is it just me, or is it obvious to everyone, that competition is ultimately self-defeating. The competitive economy, carried to its logical conclusion, will result in the elimination of all but one organization, which organization has only one employee, the owner; and a general populace all but one (the owner of the successful organization) of which is unemployed.

Moreover, when all is said and done, all the natural resources required for its products will have been consumed by this most successful of competitive organizations, and there will be no people with incomes derived from employment to purchase the goods or services produced by the organization.

Regulation Not The Answer

Government regulation, increasingly viewed as undesirable, can only moderate or postpone, but not eliminate, these inevitable consequences of competition. Moreover, as is apparent to anyone who has paid much attention to such matters, government regulation, because it severs, or at least drastically reduces, the connection between an organization's actions and the resulting consequences, often leads to organizational lethargy, waste, lack of cost-consciousness, and fraud.

Competition Results In Inferior Products

Measures of success in a competitive economic environment include such things as market share, gross income, profitability, value of shares of stock, etc. They do not include such things as the durability, safety or reliability of the product. Hence, competition leads to insufficiently-tested products being prematurely introduced; corners being cut in quality control; planned obsolescence; false or misleading advertising; the introduction and promotion of products known or suspected to be unsafe; efforts to resist, postpone or defeat health, safety, and environmental initiatives; etc. Conversely, when people are motivated by passion rather than competitive pressures, the products of their labors are often both superior and inexpensive or free.

The End Of Employment As We Know It

With or without competition, advances in technology are leading inexorably to the eventual elimination of most productive jobs in this country and, eventually, throughout the world. Already, the majority of the jobs in this country do not add one whit to the goods or services available to our citizens. For example, the great majority of the jobs in the following fields fall into this category:

• Advertising
• Sales
• Law
• Government
• Defense
• Finance
• Insurance.

Moreover, a substantial minority, if not the majority, of the remaining jobs also are unnecessary, and owe their existence exclusively to the fact that our economy is presently based in large part on competition. Specifically, these jobs are unnecessarily duplicated in organizations that are competing with each other. If there were only one organization producing the product, the need for redundant such functions (and associated jobs) in each of several redundant organizations would be eliminated. For example, if there were only one automobile manufacturer, there would be need for only one set of:

• Accountants
• Administrators
• Managers
• Designers
• Support Staff
• etc.

in the automobile industry instead of the multiplicity of redundant such jobs that presently exist in each of the many automobile manufacturering firms.

People Are Unfulfilled In Their Work

Most people do not like their jobs. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the following are chief among them:

• Many people do not gain satisfaction from the kinds of work that at once:
  • someone is willing to pay for, and
  • they are qualified to perform.

• Conversely, there is no economic market for many of the activities from which people do gain satisfaction, many of which, not coincidentally, benefit society as a whole. Hence the need for volunteers, charities, and the like.

• Competition leads to pressure and personal stress.

• Competition leads to emphasis on speed rather than quality; thus workers cannot take pride in the results of their efforts.

The Nation Is Wealthy But Its Citizens Are Poor

In large part because of the elimination of many relatively high-paying jobs due to advances in technology and/or the global economy:

• median personal income is lower than at any time in the past 20 years;

• more people in the US today have incomes below the poverty line than at any time since the concept was established; and

• more people are homeless than at any time in the nation's history.

This, despite the fact that the nation as a whole is richer now than at any time in the past, on both an absolute and per-capita basis. How can this be?

This can be, and is be, because:

• there are more goods and services produced and available in this country than at any time in the past,
• more of the nation's wealth is concentrated in fewer hands than at any time in the past.

Money Is Only One Of The Roots Of All Evil

Our competitive economic system, combined with population growth and irresponsibility or incompetence on the part of the individuals comprising society, are among the root causes of the increasingly antisocial behavior we are witnessing today.

• It has been observed in both natural and experimental settings that as population density increases beyond a certain point, antisocial behavior increases in a wide variety of organisms. Over the past 40 years, the population of the United States has more than doubled and the population of the world has more than tripled.

• Hungry people, even socially responsible hungry people, will commit crimes in order to eat if they see no alternatives.

• Unhappy, hostile, and self-hating people commit crimes in response to their unmet need for personal fulfillment.

Poor Child-Rearing Practices Lead To Hate and Discontent.

Largely as a result of their parents' lack of knowledge and ability with respect to child-rearing, children are growing up hostile and angry. Such children, and the adults that they later become, tend to be self-centered and sociopathic. Of course there's nothing new about this. The great majority of human parents from time immemorial have been bearing and raising their children with little or no knowledge of the relationship between their actions with respect to the children and the ultimate effects on the childrens' personalities and behavior. Hence the pervasiveness of crime, war, and other antisocial behavior throughout recorded history.

My Proposed Solution

I propose the following set of actions, which I believe, taken together will substantially mitigate, if not altogether resolve, the problems and issues discussed above.

• Because all the real goods and services produced in this country can be (and in fact are) produced by a small fraction of the population, it is no longer appropriate to require or expect a person to have a job or otherwise earn money with which to buy those goods and services. Instead, each citizen should be given a sufficient amount of money that he can live comfortably. Let's call this the "societal gift". The societal gift for a single adult should be on the order of $60,000 annually. The amount of money for a couple sharing living expenses might be $90,000, and for a family of four, the amount might be $130,000. These figures are, of course, based on today's costs. In fact, once competition is eliminated, the cost of most goods and services will be substantially reduced as a result of lower overhead, the elimination of duplicative functions, the elimination of taxes associated with welfare and social insurance, etc.

• The relatively few remaining jobs (I estimate that fewer than one in three existing jobs will remain after competition is eliminated) will initially be awarded to those who are best qualified to perform them, as measured by aptitude, knowledge and skills tests developed for this purpose. I predict that after the first year or two that such a system is in place, the competition for these few remaining jobs will be fierce, as people realize that they would rather be working and accomplishing something than not. A mechanism for periodically reassessing and reselecting candidates for these jobs must be developed.

• Those receiving the aforementioned societal gift must agree to adhere to a social contract. This is the "responsibility" component of "Cooperative Responsibility". Basically, the contract will require the signatories to agree to behave responsibly with respect to themselves, others in society and the environment. The contract will be a simple one. It will stipulate that:
  • Signatories agree to commit no crimes against persons or property.

  • With respect to their actual or potential progeny, they agree to:
    • receive training and pass tests of parental competence,
    • adhere to the aforementioned precepts of parental competence, and
    • limit themselves to two or fewer offspring in their lifetimes.

  • With respect to current and future generations, they agree to act as stewards, rather than owners, of the planet and its resources.

  • Signatories agree to limit their personal income, regardless of source, to a figure that exceeds the annual societal gift by a specified small percentage, and to contribute any income in excess of that specified figure to the pool from which all societal gifts are derived. This will tend to eliminate the incentive for speculative investments, and reduce the impetus to greed and growth for its own sake.

Conclusion

This document is a bare outline of a proposal that I think, with elaboration, improvement and implementation, has the potential to ameliorate many of the problems that the human race is contending with. Obviously, there are many theoretical and practical problems to be overcome in bringing this proposal, or anything similar to it, to fruition. I welcome input and discussion regarding any such problems and their solutions. I invite each reader to propose modifications or alternatives to this proposal that he believes has a greater potential for successfully addressing the societal problems that I listed at the beginning of this document. I want to find the best solutions to these problems, and this is the best I've been able to devise so far.