Money does not make the world go round

I read a letter from Nicko Williams, founder and Chief Executive of Climate Cars (a taxi service using only Hybrid cars) to The Economist, reprinted in The Week magazine (31/3/2012). I think it is nonsense, reflecting a view that can see past money as the beginning and end of everything.

He writes "my question is whether it is reasonable to expect living standards to keep improving" and his answer appears to be 'no', because he adds "For our generation [he is 28] to work harder and longer than the last seems to me to be an inevitability". This is because, he says, "History tells us that we live in cycles" and "We live in a far more competitive world than our parents, therefore our generation will have to fight harder, with the prospect of lower comparable rewards than our parents."

What brings us an improved standard of living, Nicko, is science and technology. Are you seriously suggesting that there hasn't been phenomenal progress in this? In fact progress in science and technology has been exponential.

Much of this technology has brilliant potential for labour saving, so why are we, or must we, work longer and harder? We were told that technology would liberate us from work, but this seems to quietly have been dropped. The problem is that by saving labour, technology reduces employment, and in our system employment is the main way to get money and money is pretty much the only way to get access to the resources we need to live and thrive. Break this link between work and survival, and you allow techonology free rein to improve our lives.

"History tells us that we live in cycles". No, history tells us that we have lived in cycles. The cycles referred to are, I assume, the so-called economic cycles, which are in fact just monetary cycles. These are entirely man -made and unrelated to the real resources available to us. There is no cycle in technological and scientific development and there is no inevitability that the monetary cycle will repeat.

"We live in a far more competitive world than our parents, therefore our generation will have to fight harder". Fighting harder is virtually the same as competing more, therefore, generalised, this statement becomes X therefore X. Logical flaws aside, do we live in a more competitive world than our parents, and - more imnportantly, is this inevitable?

I don't know how overall competitiveness might be measured or aggregated, but I do know that co-operation rather than competition, is encroaching on the old scarcity mentality of fighting for resources. http://www.collaborativeconsumption.com/ would be a good place to start some research ino this, but as boss of a taxi firm, Nicko is already working to an access or service model, rather than an ownership model in the field of personalised transport.

Nicko's 'monetary blind spot' is most clearly identified in his reference to the "unprecedented property boom" his parents' generation experienced. 'Property boom' is slang/jargon for house prices going up. Apart from the fact that house prices rising faster than incomes makes it harder for people to afford to buy one ('get on the housing ladder' in the jargon) - a downside that is usually ignored - it is obvious that the true value of a house is independent of how much it can be sold for, and given that left unmaintained a house will eventually fall down, its value (as distinct from its price) tends to fall over time.

Money may indicate true value, albeit rather crudely, but it is not true value itself. If we do not take our eyes off money, and look at human need and the planet as a finite resource, we are doomed as a species.

Politicians and government

At this year's Zeitgeist Day (my third, unbelievably), there was some Q&A about the role of government in transitioning to an RBE. Some say we should try to get govenment on board, and others that that is far too optimistic as government is far too venal. For the moment, my thought is that we can't leave government to politicians.

On thetrain travelling home, I read an editorial by Jeremy O'Grady, editor-in-chief of The Week. It is apposite. He wrote: "democracies create all kinds of devices- elcctions every five years, First Past The Post, the European Court of Human Rights -  to ensure that the will of the people is not given too much of a look in. Whisper it quietly, but that's a good thing."

So there you have it - a news editor condoning constraints on democracy. Don't get me wrong, opinion, especially if uninformed, is worthless. It's just that we're played along, and given just enough input to the democratic process to make some people think that our input/opinion actually counts.

Drugs and superbugs

It would be easy to be cynical about the claims made on You Tube or in blogs regarding pharamaceuticals and the inherent problems of drug development in a free market, but an article in The Independent featured in The Week cites the chair of the UK Government's antibiotic resistance working group, Peter Hawkey. Presumably mainstream enough?

An estimated 25,000 people a year die in the EU of antibiotic-resistant infections. Why are drugs companies not developing new drugs for this? No money it. Not as profitable as heart disease or cancer.

A direct example of profit before people. An RBE would be the potent drug against such evil.

Growth error

Jolyon Connell, founder and editorial director of The Week magazine writes in the 8 October 2011 edition that Matt Ridley, wrote in The Times that "the West has been running a vast financial pyramid scheme, but the world itself is not in debt." Correct. We haven't tried borrowing money from other planets yet and the world is of course a closed system: This applies as much to finances as anything else and importantly physical resources. But Ridley continues: "the world economy actually grew by 5% last year according to the IMF." This is factually correct, I assume, but we are talking about growth in GDP/GNP (which are identical at world level). We can't have a pyramid scheme with real resources, because they are finite. If we "liquidate our natural capital and call it income" as the authors of Natural Capitalism term what we are doing, no restructuring, bailing out, quantative easing or any other financial tinkering will save us.

Public vs Private Sector

An article in The Week (10 July 2010) which was presumably quoting from a newspaper columnist - it may be Eamonn Butler in The Guardian - it's unclear - said of the 600,000 people public sector employees forecast to lose their jobs - "with nearly half a million jobs now being advertised, even in these uncertain times, there's plenty of scope for committed people to find work."

The forecast is for 1.3 million jobs to go in both sectors, but the article also quotes the Office of Budget Responsibility's forecast of 2.5 million new private sector jobs by 2014. The article doesn't attempt to decide whether these 2.5 million jobs are new additional - ie whether we are to deduct the 700,000 (1.3 million less 600,000) or it has been deducted.

It's a fat lot of good callibrating all this in "jobs" as if any one job is equal to any other job, and here we have the tacit assumption that private sector jobs are better than public sector ones. "Committed" people in the public sector will of course go out and get a new job in the private sector. What it is they were doing in the public sector or will be doing in the private sector is entirely irrelevant, it would seem.

If a job is pointless - having no social return - and is just there to give someone something to do so they can earn money and thereby access to the necessities of life, the 'sector' that it is in is entirely irrelevant. The point is that we should arrange to have done the things that are necessary for our survival and prosperity as a species by the most efficient means possible, and this means de-coupling work from access to the necessities of life.