Resource Based Economy Requires Electric Grid Modernization First

Those wishing for serious political change should take a look at electricity technology infrastructure. Major investments into smart meters, public energy ownership + storage, HVDC transmission cables, modernized electric grids, and a digital network to manage it all.



Let's provide a bit of context for advocacy of something as seemingly dull sounding as digital electric smart meters.

Conceptualizing and verbalizing political alternatives to current socioeconomic stagnation is widely understood to be preferable to mere critiques. As important and vital as a critique is, it has little power without provision of an alternative to fill the vacuum. Critiques are now a booming mainstream industry with today's internet enabled resurgence of muckraking journalism. Provision of serious socioeconomic alternatives is in the early stages of becoming a major trend as well. Online video debates and video replies to recorded educational speeches are a modern example of 18-19th century political debates via pamphleteering.

Similarly, provision of an alternative is toothless without certain technological infrastructural components to make it viable and workable. Tangible investments into physical precursors that make any major political alternatives possible ought to be focused on more than ever. All of the above 3 approaches to social change (critique/alternative/technology) gain maximum power when conducted in parallel with certain emphasis on actual technology induced physical change on the ground. For example, a political faction ought to focus on energy production and distribution regardless of whether the group advocates more political decentralization, more centralization, or a novel hybrid of both for different areas of societal management. Precise vast storage of energy, transmission of it over large areas, and precise computer tracking of production and distribution of vast quantities of electricity is needed to make each different political concept work.

For the most part, specific policy proposals currently are not often tied to technological solutions but rather monetary incentives and disincentives (there is currently an elite driven trend towards soft paternalism). This carrot and stick approach to prod the herd into an even more technologically complex society in the 21st century is inefficient. Considering that economics is an engineering challenge, there is a better way. Government ownership of electric generation used to be more widespread in the United States and contributed to rapid regional development from 1930s to the present. Surviving remnants of it such as the Tennessee Valley Authority are the best examples of a wide scale public system of beneficial power management.

It is immediately clear how ability to manufacture, transmit, and monitor electricity directly affects ability to provide a life artery to any policy proposal in raising human standards of living. The only discussion here concerning public ownership of a sophisticated electrical smart grid (acting as a sort of "skeleton" on which developmental and social projects can grow) is whether ownership is at the municipal, state, regional, national level, or a federated sharing combination. For instance, if a city owns a fission reactor and produces a megawatt of power, does it reserve 20% of it for use by its regional and national neighbors? Or conversely, does it receive a stipend of additional 20% of power from a regional outside authority? Does the city sub-network just continuously release surplus power into the larger grid or is it collected in local large scale energy storage facilities? [You may begin to notice here and in later articles that electric power achieves certain characteristics of money such as liquidity which can be taxed and redistributed as needed.] Various economic projects involving housing, employment, healthcare, and general infrastructure will require for municipalities to figure out their energy generating and energy sharing arrangements. For them to do so, they first need technological components to make futuristic power management possible.

This cannot be stressed enough. Vast majority of what The Pragmatist suggested over the last few years is not possible without the above. Electric smart grid (and overlapping digital data grid to monitor/control it) is the distilled essential for any future society. We can call it various colorful names to promote it (circulatory and nervous systems of a society for instance) but after much deliberation it is clearly the primary step to take. Even if a high tech liquid direct democracy is achieved, it will not be able to accomplish as much without public energy accounting that the grid allows. People's will and political will is shaped and checked by underlining physical technological realities. A lot of current political and social projects would not be possible in a society at a 19th century level of technological and electrical development. In this way, much like economics is an engineering challenge, so is politics and popular consciousness.

Resource based economy and resource accounting is not possible without very effective energy accounting first. Smart Meters and grids give rise to possibility of technocratic governance.

During the hay day of America's Technocracy movement in the 1930s, the main piece of literature (explaining the functioning, goals, and reasons for an empirically managed society) emphasized the need to measure the total amount of electrical generation on the North American continent in real time. This was to understand exactly how much power various extraction, production, and distribution industries use in order to drastically reduce inefficiencies in the national economy and to have the highest possible load factor at all times. This type of informational awareness was obviously not possible at the time especially considering the additional energy accounting complexities that Technocrats advocated (such as energy certificates to be issued to each individual).

Figure 1. Click to Enlarge

As of 2014, North America is covered by a handful of regional wide area synchronous grids (Fig. 1) that are themselves in the gradual process of merging into a continental Unified Smart Grid as mentioned in the previous article. The backbone of the Technocratic vision is thus forming. Potential susceptibility of smart grids to cyber attacks and infiltration necessitates public involvement for security reasons. As the most vital infrastructure component in the country, government authorities have a responsibility to ensure safe, constant, and reliable functioning of the grid as a whole. Military grade encryption will also be required here to ensure that this "Energy Internet" is free of outside disruptions. Subsequently, public control of the energy industry allows public leverage over all other heavy industry. "Security reasons" are a good way to market technocracy to groups in society which may not otherwise be as open to it.

The energy usage of machines that dig up, process, turn raw resources into finished product, and transport it to your locality can now be tracked accurately. The flattening of production and distribution chains that has occurred in recent decades under the guidance of such multinationals as Siemens and Wall-Mart already allows careful monitoring of the entire process. A two way directional energy grid further enables the measurement and control of energy usage of every piece of hardware within this chain. Efficient public industrial and infrastructural policy is now possible via these precise assessments of non-monetary costs. Currently, the cost of any project is measured in money where many blind spots, inefficiencies, and corruptions can be found (such as bloated overhead, middlemen, and undue distortions from non-physical financial sector.) Smart meter management software allows projects of the future to have a transparent real time digital record of the entire process on the physical level. This enables audit of records at any time and subsequent rapid corrective actions.

This ultimately will result in ever increasing representation of technical experts in governmental bodies at all levels. Fusion of technical cadres with governmental cadres is the smoothest way to gradually and peacefully replace the latter. Government cadres increasingly filled with greater and greater proportion of electrical and software engineers is by definition a growing technocracy. This may not exactly be 1/3 of the national legislature staffed with technical experts and scientists like in France but the necessity of greater physical efficiency in government puts us on the road towards legislatures staffed like that.

HVDC cables allow regions, provinces, and counties to act like metropolitan areas

With rapid projected urbanization for most people throughout the world, it may look like very large cities will inevitably become dominant political actors that leave scattered towns, small cities, hamlets, and villages between them increasingly economically and socially isolated. This doesn't need to be the case as hundreds of towns and/or entire counties can band together via efficient high powered long distance transmission HVDC cables and function as singular large cities. Much like diverse energy sources of various strengths can join together into a virtual power plant, local governments can collectively function as one unit without actually politically merging. For example, rather than the economy of New York State being dominated by New York City, counties in upstate New York may use the smart grid technology to work together to manage their energy, resource, and development needs. Hundreds of small spread out populations and political units can thus create a decentralized entity with population, economic size, and political bargaining power similar to a nearby metropolis. Additionally, being able to see precise electrical data for any sized political unit allows municipal role modeling behavior, emulation of successful technical projects, mutual learning, and rapid adaptation of what works. There is no need for small city mayors to wait for urban sprawl from nearest two large urban centers to swallow the town so large infrastructure projects can begin. Distributed generation of electrical power on a regional scale finally enables them to collaborate and pull resources together on projects larger than would otherwise be possible. A highly spread out region of 5 million people can create a similar concentrated economic focus as a densely packed and compact city of 5 million.

First resource based economy (RBE) experiments will likely be conducted in smaller cities. Their success will not only depend on their ability to generate their own power independent of the larger grid but their ability to trade surplus power to the larger grid as well as cooperate with fellow resource based economy settlements via HVDC smart grid network. As mentioned earlier in the article, regardless of whether one's policy requires more municipal autonomy/localism, municipal collaboration, or centralization, these emerging electrical platforms facilitate any proposal. However, our focus here is infrastructural ability of say, 10-30 small RBE cities to act in a synchronized political unison even if separated by hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Much like transnational corporations achieve certain critical mass with economies of scale, smart grids will allow spread out political experiment social units to reach economies of scale with collaborative energy use.

Regardless of where a person stands on the political spectrum, it appears that a political faction that makes best use of modernizing the electric grid first will begin to dominate in the market of ideas.

Technocracy Movement Becoming Popular Again

There is a potent reason why the Western world is seeing alternative samizdat publications and sites spread like wildfire. The quote below encapsulates it and is from the online Technocracy Study Course (Available in PDF.  Emphasis on pages 121-143 if you don't have much time.) 

What is all the more shocking is that Technocracy Movement was very popular in the 1930s (the quote above is from the 1947 version) and stood as an all American alternative to some of the more European systems being proposed at the time. Educational conferences like the one pictured below were common and many prominent technocrats went on to serve in helping build the new FDRist state in the 1940s-1960s period.

The continental plans at the time appear grandiose to a post-industrial, post-cold generation but considering the pace in construction of continental economic unions and mega engineering being back in vogue due to China, we may return to similar thinking soon.

Wages in a Resource Based Economy

Compensation in resource based economy will be underlined by energy accounting



The main question that technocrats all over the world are asked is "how will we get a herd of 7 billion monkeys to transition away from the current fiat monetarist system towards a real economy based on resource and electrical energy quantities? How will they be motivated beyond promise of self-aggrandizement and greed?"

Simple answer is that transition to a resource based economy will involve all the same gimmicks used by rulers since the dawn of civilization: greed, fame, honors, and promise of some inequality (although much more reasonable and controlled than currently). Some key differences from the present system are an ever rising safety net baseline to meet basic needs of the populace and compensation in material/energy backed units. Late 20th century methods of artificial scarcity management, central bank printing presses, and Soviet rations have run their course.

Here is one basic outline among many: ( sidenote: The Pragmatist is not an unofficial media arm of any existing technocratic organization even if I provide a link to a wonderful technocracy video introduction at the top right corner of the blog. Check it out! There will be many competing energy accounting and resource accounting systems in the coming decades and they will begin to converge in basic themes eventually.)

1) 10 wage compensation levels with level 1 wage as guaranteed minimum income and level 10 wage as maximum income (10 is used here for metric system style simplicity, it could very well be 6 or 8). There are physiological limits to how equal humans are but there are also physiological limits to how unequal they are. One human receiving no more than 10 times the amount of reward, living space, fame, and electrical output is about right. No human, no matter how strong or gifted is more than 10 times smarter, stronger, productive, "better", than the weakest (multiply IQ of 20 by 10 as an example).

2) At the age of consent everybody starts as a level 1, receiving say, 10,000 units of electrical energy as a basic living stipend (in addition to minimum level 1 modular housing unit, level 1 simple food ration, and provision of equal baseline education and healthcare for all). A level 10 would receive a stipend of 100,000 electrical units to do with as he/she pleases since amount and increase in top compensation is pegged to level 1 baseline.

3) Although transition period may involve brief return to deflationary "sound currency", income eventually will be provided in amount of electrical energy available to you for a certain amount of time. For example, a level 3 person may get 30,000 units of energy a year or 576 units a week. If he or she doesn't spend these 576 units that week on art supplies (or additional non-stipend clothing, grooming supplies, level 8 rare food, etc) then the units don't roll over. They "expire" and return to communal use to provide extra kick for energy intensive infrastructure projects. Nobody could thus hoard up or create a banking lending system with their saved up energy within the common grid. Obviously on the side shenanigans can be done with off grid energy supplies and batteries but common grid can be easily kept separate from it. A person trying to compete with common grid and create "energy banking" would be like a mom and pop store creating water/food banking. The energy wage system is a communal and very macro safety/incentive net.

4) Societal honors, social pressures, education, societal attention, and better mating opportunities are the incentive to educate yourself further to qualify for higher wage level compensation. Some may prefer to marry or have sexual relations with apes of only certain levels just like currently. It is relatively easy to create social mechanisms to encourage personal growth, especially when basic needs of shelter, good nutrition, and healthcare are met (one just has to look at how people are compelled to improve themselves and pursue various non-graduation/non-wage related interests on some of the better college campuses).

5) The rise of maximum income wage is tied to rise in minimum income stipend to create incentives for strongest people to improve conditions for the whole herd. Thus if level 10 leadership builds enough new power source infrastructure to raise the amount of electrical power they give themselves from 100,000 units annually to 200,000 units annually, the provision of minimum stipend for level 1 people will also double from 10,000 to 20,000. This way, the gifts of the strongest create a real and automatic trickle down. An enterprising level 10 living in a house 10 times larger than level 1 house may ask his or her level 8-10 colleagues to contribute their energy towards a new experimental project or an idea.

6) This is very easily calculated by seeing and tracking the total amount of electrical energy available within relatively decentralized global "energy Internet" power grid. Amount of energy flux density within any given area is readily seen as well as deficiencies by relating the energy amount to population per square kilometer. Energy accounting is thus the base of the resource economy superstructure. Calculating energy production and distribution is essential for all other material production, material rationing, and distribution. This is a no brainer and rapid construction of new and better energy sources will be the primary societal and leadership task of level 10 people.

7) Electrical compensation is tied to the amount of schooling that was needed for the task and amount of hours spent on the task. Thus a level 10 after years of training, has to work the entire 20 hour workweek until retirement at the age of 40 (yes those aren't typos, think about the technology enabled progress in leisure time that occurred over the last 100 years from 16 hour workday turning into 8 and so on).

8) To repeat, 20 hour workweek and retirement at 40 (with a generous stipend to almost match the wage level) to allow fresh talent to take control in a fast paced 21st century environment where exponential progress in technological gadgets, implants, biological and pharmacological augmentations makes late retirement a danger to the whole planetary herd. Gerontocracy at all levels is a public safety risk of enormous proportions. The elderly should be comfortably and rapidly retired with allowances for extra talented ones to continue working without societal coercion that presently exists (like losing a home). A level 5 would work 10 hours a week correspondingly. We should see surprising amount of volunteering at this stage of human development by people who are restless to utilize their training after years of school. We already saw rise in mass scale volunteering in Anglo-American space in 1960s-2010s period and in Soviet space in the 1920s-1950s period. If there is a grand exciting societal construction project, a new wave of volunteering will automatically be generated considering the new 21st century incentive structure, safety net support, and moral encouragement.

9) Level advancement can also be provided as honors for certain heroic tasks, extra special inventions, contributions to the herd, etc. This can be democratically decided to prevent corruption. Corruption itself at political level greatly reduced by systems such as examination with democratic popular input for highest scoring candidates. 

10)  Systematic targeting of land monopolies that currently exist in the form of landlordism to prevent too much centralization in energy production and distribution and to eliminate last remnants of feudalism. Modification to underlining land ownership structure from private to communal  is essential to prevent creation of unhealthy regional patchworks where areas with access to harder energy supplies (fission reactors) are able to browbeat neighbors. Eventually, with enough globalization and agreement on level 1 stipend standards for continents, some agreement needs to occur on global level 1 stipend goals.

Upon closer examination, none of this is utopian since controlled inequality and greed/sex based reptilian brain incentives are preserved. If one appreciates the sheer technological potential that humanity is looking at with transhuman augmentation, nanotechnological mass production, AI, AND if one understands that the time horizons we're looking at stretch into the 2050s, THEN the simple replacement of monetarism with more rational energy accounting described above is definitely not utopian. Current 2012 living standards enjoyed by more enlightened human wage slave plantations of Japan, Scandinavia, and Germany would have sounded similarly rather "utopian" to people in the 1850s. Yet we don't have to wait till 2150s due to the technological progress in means of production and distribution continuing to accelerate.

Some unanswered questions

"So will level 4 person get 4 times the food or 4 times the quality of the food or combination of both? Will shelter and food on higher levels also be provided on a stipend basis or will the additional electric units will be required to pay for it? What happens to rich people and their mansions currently? I can already visualize ways to abuse the system, what do we do with the shameless scoundrels? I certainly would like to spend my annual 50,000 units after my 10 hour workweek not on a level 5 shelter but maybe on three level 1 shelters in different sectors and a new kitty cat and maybe 2 cars instead? Can I forgo a stipend in clothing to get more energy units and what happens if..."

It is... too... early... for that.... First it is important to understand why we're on this road to begin with. 

Terraforming The Sahara Desert

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Sahara desert is almost the size of United States and Europe. Making it arable and livable is the first great infrastructure project of this century.



Funding! ("I'm sure the article proposes something neat but how will we pay for it?!")

Alright alright ye jaded reader, first things first. International Tobin Tax on financial transactions. When working with Tobin Tax rate of 0.1% (as suggested by Nicolas Sarkozy), plenty of funding becomes available for megaprojects, especially those that are fundamentally transnational in nature. Overall amount of financial transactions has steadily been rising to be 70 times the official global GDP ($ 63.12 trillion in 2010). This allows a United Nations body receiving the tax to collect $4.5 trillion annually. That's substantially more than say, nominal GDP of Germany ($3.6 trillion) and the number will increase if Asian financial centers continue to expand to accommodate neighboring growth and to compete with London.

Transforming 9,400,000 sq miles of Sahara desert will increase world's agriculture capable land by 20% and arable land by 70% (if taken to that level). Benefits of terraforming this particular region include:

1) Promoting regional and global cooperation. Helping narrow the Arab North African and Black Central African geographic, cultural, and economic divide. Creating a breadbasket to be shared by over 10 large countries previously polarized by this divide. Thus...

2) Helping consolidate African Union as a political and economic block. Thus...

3) Allowing African Union to become a powerful pole in a multipolar world. A pole that is able to sustain its own population (which is set to double) and to be in a better negotiating position when exchanging natural resources for advanced machinery from other continental unions.  And of course...

4) Wiping out hunger close to its source and creating food export potential for nearby Indian Subcontinent and parts of Asia. Allowing more land to accommodate continent's industrialization and population rise that comes with it. Thus ultimately...

5) Lowering chances of major regional or global wars, reducing chances of imperialism 2.0 on African soil, and creating additional mechanisms necessary for some form planetary governance (that finally brings about world peace and significant reduction in weapon systems expenditures).

Global Political Feasibility

Pushing for a creation of global Tobin Tax (or any transnational tax) collecting body in the UN security council has primarily Britain as an obstacle. Britain has historically relied upon financial parasitism and used various economic and physical pressures against societies that attempt rapid infrastructural development. Small financial centers like Singapore can be browbeat into compliance via combined pressure of the Security Council. Britain can be pressured by making it clear that its soft power projection ability will be severely damaged for decades to come if it obstructs life saving funding mechanisms for transnational projects. It is way past time for majority of the world's population to make it clear to London that it can no longer defy major developmental powers without consequences. Of course Britain, being militarily occupied by United States, can also be pressured in more crude 20th century ways. At the very least, Britain needs to agree to not interfere in transnational infrastructure projects.

Tobin Tax has a more "volunteer" feel to it as opposed to funding global infrastructure projects via direct income taxation by state governments. The popular mood in post financial crash Western world will also increasingly allow for it. That is especially true if the sheer amounts that can be collected are explained by heads of key states. In elite priming magazines like Foreign Affairs we already see a major shift towards open mindedness concerning global experimentation. Some recent examples of mainstream suggestions are global debt jubilee for first world and a call for a hybrid economic post-liberal system (made by Francis Fukuyama of all people). In their desperation to reverse decline, create domestic jobs, and wrestle some leadership from Beijng and Moscow, elites in DC, London, and Paris should be more open towards terraforming. Their countries have the best technologies and talent for it. It also allows them to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to all the incessant harping of global warming.

Even a partial planetary funding mechanism for arable land increase will find eager sponsors in New Dehli and Beijing. Chinese government is already beginning to implement decades long North to South river reversal project as well as efforts to stop and reverse the spread of the Gobi desert. They will have the mass workforce, expertise (quantitative edge versus Western qualitative), and machinery to contribute in Africa for resource swaps. India's interests in helping construct a breadbasket in the Sahara is self explanatory.

Regional Political and Physical Feasibility

Sahara desert region has the least amount of "not in my back yard" mentality, the least amount of people living in the desert's overall periphery, and less potential for great power rivalry hampering the terraforming efforts (as opposed to say, Saudi or Iranian deserts or the Central Asian plains by the Aral Sea). The nation states touching the desert are generally poorly armed and can be collectively pressured to cooperate with sufficient incentives (unfortunately appeals to wipe out hunger on the continent don't work that well). Over 25 countries are directly affected by the Sahara question. Once the process begins, Sub-Saharan African elites may begin to take over and get creative with it (possibly partially being inspired by the way South American societies are collectively getting out from beneath the USA boot.) Nearly double digit GDP growth in many African states over the last decade helps in this regard.

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Governments of North Sudan, Egypt, and Algeria will require projects to keep their youthful populations occupied and will get on board with breadbasketization of their back yards (even if UN/China/India require a certain long term agricultural quota promise in return for the investment funds allocated). Nigeria, the continent's most populous country and a sort of regional superpower, has a chance to really shine as well. The new Libya perhaps has the greatest amount to contribute with its experience of building world class Great Manmade River.

Southern Europe (France/Italy in particular) have an interest in a stable expanding North Africa that provides a market and corporate opportunities rather than refugees and illegal migrants. France will be looking for ways to expand its influence/leadership into the area to compensate for Germany's present and future expansion of influence/leadership in central Europe. It will be proper since Sarkozy was the first Western world leader to talk about the sheer possibilities of global Tobin Tax.

Process (steps should be conducted simultaneously)

1) Arresting the spread of the Sahara by combining and massively augmenting local transnational projects already in process. Even a sliver of Tobin Tax money can dramatically speed up the process of drawing a permanent line in the sand (ha ha) by bringing world class technical personnel, equipment, and desert coordination. This would be the fight against the 1930s Dust Bowl on steroids. Thousands of kilometers of trees (and possibly genetically engineered specialized vegetation) and bacteria hardened dunes  will create a permanent border.

2) Creating ocean fed artificial great lakes (think Lake Nasser supersized) at the furthest extent of sea level parity ground. This will feed rain clouds that travel deeper into the Sahara.

3) Connecting fresh water bodies of Lake Nasser and Lake Chad by a canal to improve economic communication within eastern Sahara region and to bring economic development closer to terraforming zones. The task itself it just 4-5 times the scale of Erie Canal undertaken in early 19th century. Additionally there must be proper understanding and measurement of the enormous quantity of water under the Sahara and making use of it to supply working settlements in Northeastern Sahara.

4) Making use of bacterial dune hardening as canal and artificial lake "edges" to protect new construction from sand and to prevent sand storm formation. Only a fifth of the Sahara has sand dune formation problem and it can be decisively solved via mathematical "cutting" in proper locations. Making use of the Niger river to feed a series of artificial lakes as well in western parts of the desert.

6) Mass introduction of hardy species, fungi, and plants into reclaimed areas to create new ecologies.

The first stages can be summarized as stopping, partially reversing, cutting up, and making Sahara psychologically and physically manageable to humanity. Stages after that will require mass produced small fission reactors to power human advance towards the Tibesti Mountains.

PS: The word terraforming is more marketable than geoforming or geoengineering as it touches on "space race on earth" concept mentioned in the previous article.

Maximum Wage and the Limits of Human Inequality

Pegging the rise of maximum compensation to the rise in the minimum will go a long way towards avoiding global disruptions





The appropriate maximum wage that society should have will be a critical issue in this century. It is generally agreed upon at this point that a neurosurgeon should get compensated more than a tour guide. The Soviet experience of a relatively narrow gap between highest and lowest compensation (top company manager officially earning 3-5 times the entry level worker) shows that society's progress stagnates if tangibly unequal abilities and contributions are rewarded with compensation that's perceived as relatively equal. Yet various banana republics (United States included) around the world demonstrate that stagnation also sets in when wage inequality gets sufficiently monstrous.

It is not enough to look at relatively egalitarian societies like Japan or Sweden to try to find some golden maximum/minimum ratio. What is needed is a common sense and/or philosophical framework that 1) justifies a certain income ratio
and 2) creates conditions compatible with human nature and self interest that allow the set ratio to be maintained.

1) Justification for capping the difference between top and bottom incomes should be grounded in reality and pragmatism and not idealistic popular desires of how a world should be. Theorists like Nietzsche spent considerable time elaborating that humans aren't equal. Yet in an ironic twist, the same reasons (that he gave for not having a leveling system where everybody is assumed to have the same value) can be used to set limits to difference in valuation.

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Like many characteristics of a population, the natural abilities to be exchanged for money are spread along a bell curve. Natural ability is anything that gives a physiological edge in addition to training. An example would be the hyper sensitive and rare taste buds of a top chef or a fighter pilot with remarkable reflexes and fast twitch muscles. If you take a person with poor taste buds and a person with exceptional ones and provide both with identical intensive high quality training on food preparation, there will be a certain intangible limit to how much better one chef is than the other. This applies to all professions. What is known for sure is that one is not 1000 times better chef after the training (or 100 times). Such numbers are simply ludicrous mathematically.

Napoleon Bonaparte is not 100 times superior person to say, a gas station manager and neither does Napoleon deserve 100 times more cars, 100 times more houses, 100 times better quality food, 100 times the salary, 100 times the size of personal land, etc. Think about it. Even without the leveling of military training, if you take the brain of the gas station manager and multiply its function by 10, the gas station manager would give Napoleon a run for his money in most if not all areas of life. Whether intelligence, speed, personality, patience, if you take an ability on one low end of the bell curve and multiply it by no more than 10, you automatically get to the other end of the bell curve (ex: IQ of 30*10=300).

I am using a multiple of 10 for simplicity here since the actual difference cannot be readily quantified (one perhaps can argue better for 15, 20, or 8). Considering the outrage over the bankster bonuses in the last 2 years, it appears the general public intuitively knows that there are limits to salary compensation. What remains to be done is to draw some line in the sand. A person earning 10 times as much as somebody earning 50 grand a year is getting half a million and automatically gets into top 1% income bracket. 10 times the compensation is an enormous leap. This perhaps sounds shocking, the way explaining that a duke does not have divine right to all the local land might have sounded shocking 300 years ago.

"But isn't compensation also determined by social importance of an ability (usually allocated by market forces)?"

As far as social importance, it is a very valid point. In today's absurd dying socioeconomic system, we don't see prime ministers and military generals receiving the same incomes as Lloyd Blankfein or other wall street criminals. We also don't see the operators of nuclear missile submarines getting 400 times the amount a waitress or a new army recruit gets (the way a modern CEO does compared to entry level workers in his/her organization).

Certainly the argument from social importance would indicate societal leaders, augmenters, and protectors to be the most vital. It is a tricky subject which should be properly studied with in depth examination of what professions benefit society the most (hint: engineers and scientists in political power). There are various ways of determining social importance with length and difficulty of educational training being one of them and critical examination of what makes real physical economy grow being the other (to filter out people who spent 13 years in intensive study of psychoanalysis or Gregorian chant from the top compensations).

This leads us to the idea of a free market competition, a concept as utopian and disconnected from reality as pure communism. The unregulated "market" is and will remain a diverse collection of political power centers that evolve the rules of the global private casino as they see fit. The obvious examples of the market giving top rewards to athletes, pop stars, and organized crime (Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, etc) shows that it is a very poor determining mechanism of socially important tasks. This is where we see a difficult social divergence happening between perceptions of important jobs (nuclear power plant director) and consumer determined rewards for not-so important jobs (national talk show host). Obviously we'd like for both the public and infrastructural demands (that allow the public to live) to have a say in compensation without too much divergence.

If incomes could be broken into 10 levels, it very well could be that a top entertainer should be a level 7 worker (earning 7 times more than the minimum income of level 1) while the nuclear power plant director gets to be level 8. This will be up to the politicians and the needs of the crowds as long as they maintain the ratio system (in this case, based on maximum wage difference of bottom income multiplied by 10).

2) How does one make the maximum wage system stable and compatible with human nature? The simplest solution is to make the rise in maximum salary dependent on the rise in minimum salary. This means that if level 1 worker earns 100 units a day while the top level 10 worker earns 1000, the level 10 would only be able to get a raise of 10% to 1100 units if the salary of level 1 goes to 110. If you are beginning to suspect we are moving beyond capitalism to a more high tech welfare system of the future, then you are correct. Notice how the maximum salary gets to grow while being tied up to the minimum.

Pegging the material progress of the highest compensated to the material progress of the poorest can easily work within the capitalist system but it begins to work even better in a post-monetarist technocratic system. The strongest and richest must be given a personal incentive to improve the lives of the weakest and poorest through an income peg. They will still remain 10 times better off (10 times the cars, 10 times the living space, 10 times the clothing) but at the same time, if they work in their self-interest they will be lifting all boats. This dynamic inevitably puts more technically oriented people into top positions of society where they are most needed anyway. We're talking people who understand how to improve infrastructure, logistics, and basic structural economic welfare provision.

These matters will continue being a major concern as we gradually transition to a post scarcity transhumanist world of the future. It is important that we start discussing the limits to human inequality early on before social disturbances on a planetary scale have a chance to really develop.

Ways to Screen Political Candidates

The goal of acquiring better politicians and eliminating influence of money in government points to an exam based selection system as the means




How to better achieve the age old goal of having political candidates that are right for the job? The job of course being to visibly and tangibly advance social welfare and involves:

a- decreasing price (in caloric energy spent) while increasing quality/quantity of food, electrical output, transport, shelter, education  
b- decreasing necessity for backbreaking work and subsistence living  
c- increasing safety from violence and coercion and advancing interethnic harmony
d- preserving and even expanding human autonomy during the process of all of the above

Yes, very difficult and definitely not the type of job that morons, pandering charismatic narcissists, rich man's stooges, and quick fix/gimmick driven individuals should engage in. Unfortunately, very often these days these 4 types are blended into one toxic package. To know what we want from candidates is to conceptualize a way to screen them. The public desires 3 basic simultaneous things from a person seeking power:

1) sufficiently competent to run and evolve technologically complex and very populous (over 10 million people) social units
2) sufficiently independent of oligarchic corporate influence
3) sufficiently legitimate in eyes of the public without it minimizing 1) and 2) (successfully approved by some sort of democratic input)

It is becoming very clear that neither public or private financing of candidates is achieving these. Rather than engaging in a futile task of tweaking an easily abused system (more public financing, ban on ads, regulating funds, etc), it is possible to cut off degradation and corruption of the candidate pool at the root. What needs to be made structurally obsolete is a need for money in politics in the first place. This in turn eliminates the need for advanced election marketing propaganda, fund raising pandering, and for extremely self absorbed individuals that possess a solid acting/lying/showmanship ability.

Screening method 1: Technical Exam

As previously mentioned, since economics is an engineering challenge, it is imperative to dramatically increase the quantity of candidates with scientific, civil engineering, and technical backgrounds. This calls for a comprehensive examination that candidates have to pass. Unlike the 1920s progressive era desire to screen voters via literacy tests and such, screening of ambitious power hungry candidates will find a lot more support. Relatively unbiased apolitical technical exams can rapidly be formulated and mandated for those who are to appear on the ballot the same way signature collection is.

The difficulty of the examination process can depend on the level of responsibility the candidate will possess. Perhaps the highest offices in the land may mandate taking a general exam, then secondary more closely watched exam for top 10% of scorers, and finally a final filtering test for 10% top scorers of surviving group. The last individuals left standing (say 10 people) can then be put under rigorous investigation of their personal and psychological backgrounds and be made to engage in debates before the public finally votes for who they want.

"But who controls the process!!?? Who makes the exams!!!??? Wouldn't rich people just have super specialized prep schools to create super engineers that always pass!!?? We're back to where we started!!!"

Sigh. The rich ivy leaguers are nowhere near as advantaged under the examination system since they would not get the automatic social networking and money raising boost. The materials to pass would be much more diffused and available in society (unlike the ivy social networking advantage many politicians have that prevents average people from even trying to run for office). This means that more people can try their luck at higher office. Additionally, due to the color blind nature of the meritocratic candidate selection process, the chances are a lot better for a highly qualified individual to make it into the final candidate pool (who would otherwise not get there due to voter bias against race, gender, ethnic group, age, class, etc).

We must keep in mind that the goals of candidate competence and independence from corporate control determine the means of candidate selection. If for example, one looks at a hypothetical proposal where some sort of social networking-video presentation candidate selection method is implemented, it becomes clear that once again the visually presentable and narcissistic are at an advantage. Visual selection of candidates via videos of speeches filters out the potentially far more competent individuals who may be camera shy, not be sufficiently attractive, not possess superb verbal eloquence, and so on. As of today, politics is dominated by extroverted semi psychopathic backstabbing individuals who are very eloquent and presentable. This corporate type led our society to disastrous consequences on a planetary scale. Reducing reliance on video presentation and increasing other ways of evaluation is key.

The exam itself would consist of sections such as systems thinking, civil engineering, organizational architecture, basic materials science, energy science, history, systems analysis, organizational psychology, infrastructure design, etc. If children of rich people do have some advantage of specialized prep schools, so be it, they'll be better occupied than snorting coke and becoming lawyers.

Screening method 2: Psychiatric Exam

This would test candidates for psychopathy using cutting edge medical and psychological means. This is a very serious if not the most critical issue for leadership filtering in terms of preventing damage to society. Further information concerning the societal justification can be found here.

A hypothetical argument against this can be made from certain possibility that as the ability to pass the technical exam increases, the ability to pass the psychiatric one decreases. This may be true to a degree considering schizoidia leaning introverted individuals with low empathy may excel more at engineering and systems analysis the colder their temperaments are. What has to be kept in mind is that a degree of physiologically determined empathy and emotional intelligence is not in conflict with competence but is a significant characteristic of it (especially for a political leader). To see some discussion on taking emotionality into consideration when determining policy in a group context (or even formulating a candidate exam), see here.

The reader can be assured that humanity can overcome the problem of balancing the need to screen out genuine psychopaths (who are not likely to be synonymous with advanced technical/analytic ability to begin with according to Lobaczewski) from the candidate pool while allowing very cold but harmless people to participate in evolution of social policy.

Final thoughts:

It is worth noting that technical and psychological exams can be applied to all levels of public recruitment even if the leadership is still selected completely democratically. A council of engineers instead of council of economists by the side of the mayor, governor, or president would go a long way. Some countries have already engaged in trying to screen out psychopaths during hiring of new police officers. This can be expanded easily to entry level positions within all public hierarchies. If we are to have proper reindustrialization of the Western world, the public cadres must be up to the level of the task.

Multipolar World Means More Freedom

PART 2 of Threats to Freedom Series: Mechanization makes it more profitable for world's future oligarchs to switch from competing by force and financial exploitation of the third world to competing in industrial output and welfare provision



 
Recently, the global international situation changed from one of feudalism (with each feudal lord constantly trying to slaughter the other with full use of the vassal states and being polite and collegial in peacetime) to one of libertarianism. The former vassal states/serfs are now "free" to work for former masters who now style themselves as capitalists. Every small country in the world is "free" to dress how they like and do what they want with their body as long as they work for United States or European Union sponsored financial institutions.

Those countries that really want to make autonomous economic decisions are threatened by force, internationally ridiculed, or badly beaten up. We can see how ridiculous the situation would be if 200+ "sovereign" countries were actual people living in one neighborhood block. United States would just be the muscular mob boss loan shark with a crew of yes men. They would makes rounds down the street, slap people around, or drag them by the collar. Germany, England, and Japan would be the former mobsters who put away the guns (for the most part) and now try to be the corner store owners and minor loan sharks. They pay a bit of protection money to United States and tacitly support it to preserve the global system that benefits them. France and Russia (also former mobsters who got beaten up rather badly) are the ones who want America to weaken so there can be collective bullying of the world. They try to make conspiracies with Germany to that end since collective bullying and loan sharking would give them a larger share of the cut. India, China, and Brazil are too well armed to be bullied anymore and are just trying to stay out of business on the street for now. Everybody else is at the mercy of the colorful characters above for their wealth (if they don't want to lay there dying in the streets).

It's an intolerable situation internationally and intolerable domestically. Blatant use of force will have to come to an end since racketeering is inefficient and will exhaust society that practices it through logistical overextension. That has been the case for centuries and is especially true if the racketeer does not lead in making useful products. Recent American slide into a new economic depression has accelerated the process of multipolar world's reemergence. Rise of new global powers ( European Union, China) and perseverance of old regional powers (Russia, Turkey, Brazil, Iran, India, Japan), is raising macro level competition to new levels. The oligarchs ( that exercise control over most governments on the planet) cannot compete anymore by using force since it is now economically, physiologically, and politically suicidal. As such, interstate competition has to take the form of constantly raising the quality of life for citizens living inside. As much as it pains them, oligarchal elites can no longer throw the poor armed with bayonets at each other to gain greater market share.

The modern form of post-violence competition is also burning itself out. It has so far involved:

1) Overworking citizens by ideologically promoting economic libertarianism domestically, to other great powers, and within the post-colonial space. This increasingly resulted in wealthier workers growing poorer while competing with even poorer foreign workers for an increasingly shrinking and depreciating currency pie

2) Turning small nations into indentured servants (they way American former slave masters did to freed blacks in 1870s) by force. As discussed in part 1, the international community now respects states as independent autonomous decision makers. Of course that is only on paper since United States has used mass violence and coercion during the transition of countries from colonial slavery to post-colonial dollar dominated indentured servitude. Western powers are also freed from the expense of protecting their former subjects.

3) International financial manipulation of currencies, investments, and capital flows through IMF, WTO, World Bank. This allowed Western elites and their third world elite allies in creating wealth outflows from the third world and giving regional conspirators a share of the cut

older unipolar world concept: click to enlarge

The first method of competition in terms of reduction of state power by oligarchs ( to promote economic libertarianism and profitable indentured servitude within the general population) is also overextending itself. Many oligarchs have found out (like their ancestors in the late 19th century) that if you don't provide health care and other infrastructure for your indentured servants, the rich of other countries cut into your profits with time. Many of the American rich have recently seen their worker related health care costs rise dramatically and so decided to pass on the costs to the government. Obama even admitted publicly that health reform is needed because the American worker is becoming too expensive for domestic employers. Indentured servants ( who are overburdened by costs of living and whose incomes are reduced by competition and outsourcing), are bad for domestic consumer market and bad for foreign investment. A paradox is created in which economic libertarianism cuts costs in terms of paying people less but increases costs of privately provided infrastructure. Even if private sector mimics some third world countries in not providing any infrastructure or welfare, it finds that domestic consumer market is hurt and violent insurgency looms on the horizon. Libertarian economics also reduces tax revenue to support the military as a second type of competition.

Blatant use of military force was the cheapest path of least resistance to be used short term. The French, German, American, and British oligarchs in the 1970s and 1980s could care less that the new violent indirect loan shark method of exploitation is unsustainable. They had a wonderful pretext in the form of Soviet power to defend their financial interests. They has the cover of the constant cold war emergency to look the other way when America frequently engaged in international violence. Now that the cold war is over with nothing to replace it with, there is no justification for enormous military apparatus to shake down poor nations for money and resources. Military action, besides being unpredictably draining as Iraq has shown, also results in increasingly earlier blowback from various populations. This type of competition was the most effectively and widely used by United States and we have seen how it rotted and impoverished the general society. Japanese, Dutch, and German oligarchs now smirk at the price and inefficiency of huge conventional war machine over the cheaper way of worker training and healthcare provisions. They are able to keep their white collar workers productive and obedient tax payers and supporters of the status quo.

International financial structures such as the IMF provide a forum and platform for the world's rich on how to peacefully exploit the entire planet. These structures had a competitive function against communist backed international structures (such as Comecon) for courting third world power elites. Now Chinese and Russians want inside the exclusive Anglo-American/Western European dominated financial cartel and it is beginning to lose some of its purpose.

Since these methods are burning themselves out, we will see new forms of international competition rise. We will increasing see attempts by powerful interests to use government power to create a German style welfare state. Only such attempts stand to preserve as much capitalism as possible in the face of two immediate threats. The first is competition from foreign rich who are better able to exploit third world resources/the poor while remaining domestically productive with exports (such as the Chinese). The second bigger threat to international capitalist business as usual is the rapidly increasing mechanization.

Efficiency of assembly lines and technological production has multiplied many fold since the times of Henry Ford in the 1920s. From a purely non-ideological scientific perspective (in terms of resources, rates of production, energy expenditure, etc), the world is more than capable of providing a basic annual income to 9-10 billion people along with minimum level of schooling, shelter, food, pharmaceuticals, clothing, and basic technological gadgets. This has been true for some time now. Industrial machine production has become so efficient that even in 1960s Milton Friedman talked of minimum basic wage and scientists warned the president of rising mass unemployment becoming socially destabilizing and impoverishing in the future. The truth that nobody talks about is that a large bulk of humanity is no longer needed as workers. Mechanization (which accelerated its already breakneck pace with the computer revolution in the 1980s) is making far more first world workers obsolete than outsourcing. It is absolutely ridiculous for capitalist ideologues to suggest that by the middle of 21st century, most or even a third of 9 billion people will all work in advanced hypertechnological white collar jobs.

Nobody believes it.

Here's the scenario that economic libertarian internationalists actually describe for the future in hopeful optimistic terms. They want the world united under direction of a few financial institutions so capital can flow unhindered to smoothly create the flat world that Thomas Friedman talked about. Exponentially accelerating technological growth ensures that only a few million oligarchs need to employ a few dozen million super skilled white collar technocrats to oversee production and distribution. Then of course you need whatever corporate local branch staff not already replaced by robotics. The globalization proponents actually suggest that a planetary system (that doesn't need vast majority of people to work for it) will be able to constantly sell advanced products to most of the world's population at a profit!

Say it takes for example, an outrageous number of 10% of world's population to man the factories making the nanotechnology suits and flying cars and robotic assistants. Say it also takes 10% to fill the white collar positions of the planetary corporate structures to distribute and promote the goods. 80% of people not working are supposed to to buy the products and thus provide profit and wages to the 20%! Don't laugh. The fantasy being seriously promoted by many internationalist globalists. Most people are supposed to be each others bartenders, barbers, and juggler type entertainers. Yes, even with advanced college degrees. It is so logistically irrational that the world's people will reject the idea before the real starvation, violence, and hyper poverty begin. Global unification under such a corporate system is far more structurally and practically ludicrous than any socialist design envisioned in the 20th century.

Many of the world's political and corporate elites understand this and know that transition to post scarcity systems must begin at the top while they are still in control. That entails politically defeating internationalist free market oligarchs and using the government to provide vast safety nets for the armies of the unemployed throughout the Western world. That also entails pushing the government to take managerial control of strategic sectors of the economy such as car/ship/airplane production facilities as well as the land with natural resources. Agricultural land will also be taken (most likely utilizing the health pretext of making food products safer for consumption).

Of course the process in United States will rip its social and political fabric apart and it is likely the process will first be started and finished in Germany-France-Russia-China-Japan block. Once United States follows (hopefully without civil war or other violence), most societies on earth will become advanced welfare states that technology necessitates. Free market hold outs in South America will join once they see United States blatantly copying Russia in strategic asset seizure. Many countries will flip to this model not because they can now do so without facing American violence (or investment ruin) but because the former capitalist superpower now pushes the opposite. Following the transition by most leading countries, the increasing % of society that is unemployed due to mechanization will be able to receive a minimum income and goods stipend.

Such a transition is the only one that would allow most of the oligarchs to continue making a lot of money (and avoid violence and government seizure without compensation). Thus it will be done.

This is what was meant in 1950s science fiction predictions about people in the year 2000 working 1-3 hours a day or a couple days a week. Mechanization and gains in efficiency cut out most people from being needed for work. As such, the global unification will be taken by rich welfare states that keep the factories running by providing a minimum of material goods to themselves and all the peoples of the world. Of course natural resources are needed for that. We see how China rapidly acquired 60% of Africa commodity exports while becoming the factory of the world. Perhaps "free market with Chinese characteristics" is not a euphemism for them selling out but a long term strategy to become the backbone of a new world order. Only European Union has the assets to become a partner in such a system and European oligarchs will push it to do so. Then world's governments will trade natural resources in exchange for goods that are distributed to people for free. Anything less than that (such as violent preservation of the current free market/finance architecture) means mass suffering and turmoil the likes of which we haven't seen in over 50 years.

Lets make a full circle to why a multipolar world with EU (including Russia), China, and U.S. balancing each other creates more freedom. Since the only logical logistical system is a post-scarcity stipend for most people, the key aspect of autonomy is satisfied. When individual human beings are guaranteed a food/shelter/resource stipend, they can demand greater subnational sovereign rights from international bodies and their own governments. The national governments will devolve power to people below and to international/regional structures(that supervise resource/goods trade) above. Global authorities such as departments within the newly empowered UN and International Court of Justice can finally begin to fulfill their functions and charters.

Today's competition between regional powers involves exploitation and violence. Tomorrow's competition stands to take the form in which regional powers compete to produce the most quality goods to be distributed for free. It's very easy to come up with incentives for a few million meritocratically chosen technocrats needed to operate the systems. Neither currency nor overlapping service industry capitalism need to disappear to supplement 21st century solution to a looming crisis. World's resources will flow to those states that make the best use of them. The talented technocrats will still find a society that has the best assembly lines and resource management and get paid handsomely for their services. The rest will take a small step towards the universal goal of greater sovereignty and self mastery.