Birds and Flowers
It is just lovely to wake up to the sun and sound of birds. And the center here is just beautiful - flowers, bushes, trees - green! Just a beautiful morning - and NOT raining. They tell me it is THAT time of year.
It is just lovely here. The only downer is the cold shower - but it doesn't take long. I'll survive.
Poverty Again - in the US
I was thinking about this poverty thing the other day, and culture change - and it occurred to me that the US needs a bit of a culture shift to get through what we are about. I"ll just mention here, and try to explore it a bit more later. I have read a tiny bit about this, but it struck me just right.
Our society generates wealth as a group. Red Green has it right - we are all in this together. We put together an infrastructure - laws and courts and police and roads and electricity, education - etc. We all build it up, we contribute to it - and IT generates wealth. Of course, we have something to do with it. Steve Jobs arguably generated more wealth in our society than anyone in recent times - but he didn't do it alone. And the wealth he created didn't come from mining, or crops, or even manufacturing. Those Apple gadgets are all manufactured in China - and China gets less than $10 out of the labor that goes into them. But they do generate wealth. People can communicate, can share, can dream, create, etc., on a scale we could barely imagine before. Actual farmers make up 0.7% of the population, and they feed us - together with a huge transportation and retail infrastructure, supported by banks, credit, insurance, etc. 10% of us still manufacture things - and we do it extraordinarily well. We still generate a huge share of the manufactured goods in the world - especially the bigger, more complex things. We still manufacture more than China!! See here: http://moneywatch.bnet.com/economic-news/blog/macro-view/manufacturing-surprise-the-us-still-leads-in-making-things/2134/ But we are clearly moving toward a service society - education, finance, retail, health, etc.
Up to this point, the philosophical way we share that wealth around is either by ownership of capital - the funds and goods that are invested to create wealth - or by means of our labor. The vast majority of us share in this wealth by working. We sell our labor for our share in the wealth we all generate. We may never actually create a "good", but we do the service, we maintain the infrastructure, etc. So we participate in the wealth of the society. And we have all types of skills and people with different levels of ambition, energy, etc. We have this basic cultural view - you WORK for what you get from the society. We make some exceptions for those who are somewhat less gifted. We figure out a way so that they can get a minimal level of sustenance and some self respect - but even there, we like it better when they WORK for it.
Jobs Problem
I may be wrong on the timing, but it appears to me that the era when people participated by selling their labor may be ending. We are ingenious folk - we are automating every thing we lay our hands on. It won't be long before nano-fabrication can make anything from a design spec - no hands needed. It won't be long before all of the transportation is hands off, all of the retail sales, etc. At the moment, we depend on a "consumer" economy for 70% of this wealth sharing. It's like a bootstrap operation. We need to BUY things in order to generate enough jobs to SHARE things. And we are really good at buying things - in good times. But it all has to end at some point. We will work ourselves out of work some day!
What about a different approach to sharing wealth? What if everyone had a basic right to OWN part of the means of sharing wealth? We could call it something clever, like capitalism, or shared ownership, or something like that - you know, stocks and bonds. The trick with that, I think, is that we need to redefine the idea of the Corporation. And, there are people actually working on that. Today, the way corporations are chartered and the law around them says that their goal is to return value to their shareholders, and not steal from them. Our Supreme Court has also seen fit to grant them the right to participate in our elective process - which seems idiotic to me - but we could fix that. We basically pay as a society to give people the right to education - at least through high school. For myself, I would gladly make that investment into another level of education, as does most of the developed world. I think the return to us all would be enormous. Why not pay to give everyone a participation in the wealth by means of shares in the new idea of a corporation?
Shared Ownership
As people own Capital, and they generate some income from it, we could, as a society, reduce our investment in our labor - using our investment in capital. Some of the European nations have mandated shorter work weeks already. The problem is that we then become noncompetitive. Our prices have to rise to cover the extra labor. But, we once all worked 80 hour weeks. We now manage on 40. We could reduce that and still be a competitive player on the world stage - especially as China and Africa get to the level where they also mandate shorter work weeks, and shared wealth.
The Scandinavians seem to have gotten to this level through higher levels of taxation - but my gut says that is NOT going to work in the independence minded culture of the US. We need a basic infrastructure beyond the taxing authority to support this sharing of wealth. Why not one that fits perfectly with our friend, Capitalism? Everyone says that the Scandinavians are socialists - but they are really not. They are supreme capitalists with high taxation levels. We could set another path that better fits our culture.
And that makes me wonder if there are not "other paths" to wealth generation that better fit the culture of this little country where I am at the moment. It is really difficult to change the culture - the world view. What creative things would work here that may not work elsewhere?
Plan B Corporation
Another part of our "new" approach has to be a new idea of corporation. There is a thing called a "Plan B Corporation". http://www.bcorporation.net/about
The basic idea is that this is a corporation with social responsibilities! This type of corporation has to do more than just make money for its shareholders. The goal is to make the corporation a responsible member of our society - something more than a money grubbing Scrooge!! The genius of this is also that in all likelihood, this type of corporation will actually make more money on the long haul than any other approach! Short term results are not the goal - long term results, staying power, impact on society are all part of the goal. Some Asian corporations already operate this way - and a few US ones! The enabling corporate law protects them from short term perspectives, and enables a different level of participation by the shareholders.
Enough for now
I know this has run on way too long - and it is not a finished piece. I probably shouldn't even push it out there - but it struck me just right. How does it strike you? Help me improve it - thanks.
The paper arrived - and my second cup of team. The Cardinal and Archbishop are on the front page - wonder what that's about. I'm going to read the paper and listen to the birds - and the dogs, and the motorcycles, and buses, and . . . well there are a million people around me in this city! Have a great weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment