Very well written, thought out and expressed Keith. The only problem for me is that it is a description of English society not humanity. England went for dalliance after Purcell and hasn't recovered. Dalliance (a society of collectors), Empire and Population. Population has brought the various cultures of the old empire directly into England and changed your world putting such stress on the native cultures until the stories of Bernard Shaw don't make sense anymore. Arms and the Man and all of that. What a pity. I so liked the old England of Dame Eva Turner, Winston Churchill and those bedroom farces. After the war Dame Eva was broke and had to come to the University of Oklahoma to get her resources in order before the Queen called her home as a national treasure. But she was the England of steel discipline, impeccable international credentials and a child who had sung 50 Toscas before she was 21. I guess that is gone forever.
Let me just say that The Club of Rome, Adler and Stanley Jevons are not the sum total of the rest of the world or at least the world as I know it. Are you claiming that you are the only humans here, and all of the rest that finds much more to life than that, are not? REH From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Saturday, July 24, 2010 4:32 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] Three entangled forces Reducing everything about man's activities to its basics, there appear to be three powerful driving forces which are in constant interplay with one another. Until, say, a few decades ago, different dramas were being played out in regions in different parts of the world. More recently, however, they have joined together into a drama which is now pretty well world-wide -- that is, affecting all continents and islands and reaching into even the most isolated inhabited pockets. All three forces have their origins way back in the genetic history of DNA (generally), and at present we have no idea of the crucial mutations which gave rise to them. However, we now have enough data to be able to place dates on when they began to become significant -- for which read problematical. The first force is innovation. At around 40,000BC man suddenly started to become amazingly creative. For two million years before then, man's artefacts were confined to four simple tools -- pounders, axes, spearheads and scrapers -- and little more than three status ornaments that could be easily carried on the person in those nomadic times -- necklaces, body paint and head-dresses (the last only being inferred from evidence of the few remaining hunter-gatherers). As to the four tools, they had improved slightly over the preceding two million years, but each slight change took hundreds of thousands of years to be implanted and to propagate among groups around the world. But, from 40,000 years ago, probably in Europe or the Middle East man suddenly started to invent all sorts of other objects and to carry out all sorts of new activities. He made many more types of highly-honed stone tools, also spring-launched spears (atlatls), bone flutes, figurines and whiled away his time in drawing and painting -- and, so the latest evidence suggests, map-making and pictographic words. From then onwards, innovations grew exponentially, today being largely formalized in research and development groups in businesses and academia. The second force is population. Over millions of years, our genes had already provided an automatic method for hunter-gatherer man -- the contraceptive effects of breast-feeding -- which prevented too high a population growth rate. Usually no more than three children per mother. But, once man's innovative ability had produced a new farming technology at around 8,000BC in several parts of Eurasia, then larger families would have been desirable for necessary help at seeding and harvesting times. Mothers would have interrupted their feeding schedules and become maximally fertile quite soon in the current child's life. >From then onwards world population surged exponentially from, maybe, two or three million to the billions we have today. However, in the last decade or two, as agricultural people started crowding into the major cities all round the world, the fertility rate has been declining steeply, although the world's present excess will still take at least another two generations to stabilize. Meanwhile, for a generation or so past, those parents who are living in the advanced countries have started to decrease their family size to less than the necessary two children for population replacement. Whether this is from the stress of urban living or, more likely, the simple fact of the huge and growing expenses of childrens' education, is not yet known. Strictly speaking, Western man is going extinct unless some big -- and as yet unknown -- changes are made in life and work patterns. The result is that there is now rising tension between agricultural people seeking to migrate into the advanced countries and the latter's resident populations. Also, there is an interplay between the higher educational standards required by an increasingly technocratic society and the costs and abilities of state education to supply it. As it stands today, a small minority of children in expensive private education in all advanced countries supply the bulk of administrative, business and scientific personnel who run the show. The third strong force has been the magnification of the male pecking order from relatively restricted and benign levels in the hunter-gatherer tribe to that of the leaders of the major nations with the ability to wage wars. For example, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was initiated by no more than about half-a-dozen individuals around President Bush (plus Tony Blair). But this has been a relatively minor war compared with the full-scale nationalistic wars that took place in 1914 (WW1) and 1939 (WW2). Today, the costs of armaments -- never mind the costs of actually waging large-scale war -- mean that those sorts of wars between advanced nations cannot be afforded by any longer. All advanced countries are slashing their defence expenditures. Although that may be a relief, WW1 laid a land-mine which has not yet exploded. Within a few week-ends of the start of the 1914 war, all the participating nations realized that it was going to be far more expensive than first envisaged. There simply wasn't enough gold-backed money available for governments to borrow. So they had to print additional money and, to prevent anybody exchanging it for gold at the bank, went off the gold standard at the same time. It would be tedious to relate the coming-ins and going-outs of the gold-backed currencies from then onwards as future wars were fought and having to be paid for -- including those in Korea and Vietnam but, suffice it to say, the last flimsy backing of a national currency with gold was severed in 1971 when President Nixon took the dollar off gold. Since then, currency speculation and inflation -- serious as it was before then -- took off, sometimes in wild spurts. It is these national money-printed currencies, particularly those of the American dollar and the European euro, which is causing the present chaos and a state of paralysis in the composite mind of Western economists -- who ought, if the subject has any validity at all, be able to clearly point to a solution. But they can't and it is this chaos which is going to have to play itself out in the hands of fumbling politicians during the coming weeks and months -- either continuing the present tightrope or to fall into deflationary economic depression or hyperinflation. However, the three massive forces which are in play within and between one another have three different time-scales for their solution. The problem of population -- of both over-fertility and under-fertility -- will take at least another three or four generations before the world has a sustainable, properly-fed population. The technological problem of a scalable, sustainable, efficient biofuel replacement (hydrogen) for burning fossil fuels will probably take at least one more generation of genetic research and development. However, the problem of currency needs to be solved quickly. We need to get back to a commodity-based currency (it doesn't have to be gold in principle -- it's only the most convenient material) as we had before the foolishness (one might say, the criminality) of WW1. Fortunately, the currency solution has already been worked out. In the West, the so-called Austrian school of economists -- though still ignored by most academic economists so far -- have been studying this ever since 1914. In the East (and the Middle East), the Chinese and Russian governments (and oil-nations) have more recently been proposing a world currency both for their own benefit and for their trading partners in the West. But the most thought-provoking sign of sanity is that although Western central banks have been deriding gold-as-currency for all of the last century and, indeed, actually started getting rid of it at give-away prices some decades ago, they are now hanging on to their gold and, some rumours have it, actually beginning to buy it -- just as China and Russia are doing so more transparently. Although it may be laughable -- to both gold-sceptics and gold-proponents alike -- to say this, I am beginning to think that a few key people (in government Treasuries and in one or two investment banks) are already realizing that a commodity-backed currency, beyond the reach of politicians, is now the only answer to world-wide economic stability. In solving this problem we may be nearer than we think, though it may still take a substantial economic crash to bring it about. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
