Sorry for the delay, folks. It took a while to re subscribe to my favorite lists.
--------- Forwarded message ---------- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2003 21:11:17 -0400 Subject: John Gelles Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Bcc: (Deleted by Wes Burt) To: John Gelles, other friends, and many Devious Defenders of the Status Quo (DDotSQ) on my copy list. Hello again John Gelles, My sincere thanks for your timely and thoughtful response to my note of Sept. 5, 2003, and my sincere apologies for this delayed reply. A scheduled week's vacation at Cannon Mountain in New Hampshire separated this reply from my note. The Franconia Notch is a beautiful and restful place, and at 79 I needed the rest after a year's jousting with the DDotSQ. Among the sixty, or so, messages in my "In Basket" when we returned home were several messages addressed to your lists and mine in response to your recent messages, as follows: 9-7-03, Doug Everingham introduced us to Garry Davis, "World Citizen #1 of the late 1940s, and his World Service Authority's kilowatt dollars, as a means of providing the Gelles Dollars what you propose to spend in pockets of poverty around the world, just as Japan and Germany spent Gelles Dollars from the Marshall plan to effect their post war economic miracles. In your timely response to Doug, you wrote: "We who criticize everyone else, especially those in office, might try to collaborate better with each other -- as we want them to collaborate better with each other. It is truly sad to see so many of us fighting each other for no gain at all -- fighting only to evidence our own ignorance." I feel your pain, John! 9-7-03, Garry Davis, in his note, "Re: Collaboration by leading people to Finance World Needs," advocates world government as the necessary step to make money flow into pockets of poverty rather than into the pockets of wealthy folks as it does now. 0-12-03, Doug Everingham reminded us of John Bunzl's simultaneous policy (Simpol) which defers the decision on John Gelles' "What is to be done?" until a working majority of voters within a national economy, or a majority of nations in the global economy, agree that something must be done. 9-12-03, Jack Hirschfeld presented William Pfaff's eloquent and well reasoned critique of US foreign policy since 09-11-01. But Pfaff stopped well short of offering a sustainable policy which could be considered an alternative to The Optimum Policy (TOP) or to The Open Policy Seminar (TOPS) which is presented at <www.tiea.us> and at <www.tiea.us/TOPS.htm>. John, you have me at a disadvantage because Juno has disabled my web access and I have not visited your Open Policy Seminar. But then, you have not commented on the eight visual aids which W. Curtiss Priest so kindly posted about a year ago on his web site at the URL below. The 18 months old message forwarded below will suggest that The Optimum Policy is not a Wes Burt original idea. Its center piece is the answer to your question: "What is to be done?" And the answer is: capitalize the expense of developing people as adequately as the US private sector capitalizes the expense of developing its products. The Washington Consensus allows only 50% capitalization of the expense of developing people. Think of those lucky folks on TV today who were blessed with two sets of identical twins. Suddenly, their development expense increased by $20,000/year. Japan and Germany adopted that answer after World War II and their 1946 to 1976 economic miracles set the standard to be emulated everywhere else in the world. The world is floating in a pool of money. If we would agree to remove the obstacles, the money will flow through the pockets of poverty, and the wealthy folks will still have more money than can be invested at a reasonable return. The "Washington Consensus" is now a century old and needs to be updated with benefit to all concerned. Kind regards, Wes Burt To further explore "The Optimum Policy" illustrated at URL <http://www.epie.org/cyber-soc/default.htm> please join me at list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. ~~~~~~~ Forwarded 18 months old message ~~~~~~ From: Wesley S Burt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED],[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 20:45:19 -0800 Subject: Toward An Integrated Global Society Message-ID: deleted by Wes Burt To: Members of the World Bank e-forum on "Linking Poverty Reduction and Environmental and opportunities" My subscription to env-rio-10 was accepted just in time for me to receive Robin Gaskell's 5 Mar 2002 post in reply to Dr. Ellis' comments on "The Need for an Integrated Global Society." The idea of an "Integrated Global Society" calls to mind a statistically comparable task which was accomplished during the first half of the 20th century by the electric power industry on the North American continent. To be sure, the integration of a multitude of isolated sovereign power companies, each serving its local operating area, into an international interconnected power grid concerns only a single product, electric power. But the keynote of that successful integration; the adoption of standard operating methods and rules by every member of the interconnection, may also be the keynote required for moving toward an Integrated Global Society of many Sovereign Nations. It seems to me, that the order of progress was in the power grid case, and must be in the global case, to first promulgate the standard operating methods and rules for public debate. Only then can each sovereign entity put its own house in order and properly evaluate the great benefits of "cooperation, rather than competition." The forwarded message below attempts to establish a conceptual framework capable of expressing the keynote "standard operating methods and rules" for public debate. Sincerely, Wesley S. Burt ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ --------- Forwarded message ---------- Subject: The Corrupter of Markets, Actors With "Increasing Returns To Scale." To: A Few Friends And Many Devious Defenders of the Status Quo (DDotSQ). (Copy list suppressed) Good Day Folks, My presentation of this subject must be either defective or incomplete. Since the first public presentation of Figure 10 in 1969, no one on the Internet, in the media, in the government, nor in the private sector has stepped up to the podium to explain why Figure 4 + 8 evokes both fear and loathing from society's Wealthy, Healthy, Intelligent, and Powerful members (the WHIPs). Surely I must have missed some vital aspect of this simple technical subject which I was introduced to in 1953 by the chief electrical engineer of the Kansas City Power and Light Company, Donald Cameron. He objected to a downward sloping unit cost curve ($/Kwh) in my technical presentation of an Automatic Dispatching System proposed by the General Electric Company. He said, "you cannot compute an economic dispatch of production if the several power plants exhibit increasing returns to scale." I corrected my presentation in same the way a banker issues new money, by a stroke of my pen. And the KCP&L awarded General Electric the contract for a prototype Automatic Dispatching System. Electric power is the one industry where production to inventory is not practicable and supply must be managed to equal demand in real time, 24 hours each day, and regardless of the high marginal cost of power during peak load periods. By the time I was introduced to the problem in 1953, manual methods of scheduling production to achieve a minimum fuel (energy) input to the system, while allowing the maximum economic exchange of power (trade) between sovereign corporate operating areas, were fully developed. A "loading slide rule" in each operating area, with a logarithmic scale calibrated to show the marginal cost of power from each plant, enabled each area operator to enter local corrections to plant efficiency and to load all of his connected capacity in the order of their increasing marginal costs and to know when, and how much, power could be exchanged profitably with the surrounding companies. Both the manual method, and the prototype system installed by the General Electric Company in 1954, simulated the price mechanism of a free market to accomplish a completely decentralized solution of the global objective of the interconnected sovereign power companies. That global objective was: the stable, reliable, and complete satisfaction of the demand for power with a minimum energy (fuel) input to the whole interconnected system. This is exactly the decentralized solution needed by the global economy to conserve natural resources while resisting the formation of excessive debt. Now the opportunities and the temptation to "beggar your neighbor" are as numerous and persuasive for the Chief Executive Officers of sovereign corporations on an electric power grid as they are for the Chief Executive Officers of sovereign nations in a global economy. And yet the art of power system operation has evolved to a properly desired condition in which standard methods and technologies are employed where ever power grids are operated. Should we not wonder why a comparable evolution has not taken place in the standard methods and technologies of human governance? My recent posts, prior to January 2, 2002, have evoked two diametrically opposed responses from my readers, one of fear and the other of loathing. One reader, who does not dare to join in an open discussion of the subject has treated me to a prepaid subscription to THE ECONOMIST, which I sincerely appreciate. To the contrary, another reader, surely a technically competent member of the DDotSQ, sent me an e-mail virus on January 2 which wiped out my hard disk. I elected reformatting the disk and reinstalling Windows 95 as the way to recover. What a bother! After learning more about computers than I ever wanted to know, I managed to get back on-line and empty my Juno mail box by January 27, just a few days before "Big Brother" (List Builder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) would have removed me "from all of my subscribed mailing lists." Now I know why Long Waves mail list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> decided it could function well enough without a list moderator. "Big Brother" is monitoring every mail list on the Internet in exchange for cleaning out the dead wood of address errors and filled mail boxes. Back to the important task of proposing a solution to our common global problem, which I understand to be the continuing depletion of our global natural resources and the ever increasing debt burden of individuals, corporations, and nations. I cannot even imagine a so called "global" or centralized solution to the global chaos presently caused by the propensity of two hundred sovereign nations to waste the world's human and natural resources and incur excessive debt to be serviced by future generations. But, a few nations, some industries, most corporations, and quite a few of the WHIPs in every nation have always known how to correct this systemic defect of omission in public policy which causes the ubiquitous propensity of people to waste resources and incur excessive debt. But, too many of the WHIPs believe that keeping the public ignorant of this knowledge gives the WHIPs a tremendous competitive advantage, as long as the resources wasted and debts incurred are not their's. The perversity of human nature is often given as the obstacle to bringing the practice of the political sciences up to parity with the demonstrated performance of the physical sciences. And surely, perversity is often a factor. But human nature is the same in both sciences, and has not changed much over the 10,000 years of recorded history. There are, I believe, several simpler but more profound explanations for why the development of the social sciences, including religion, have lagged behind the development of the physical sciences: (1) Those who violate the natural laws of the physical sciences are punished in the very short term by the failure of their designs and enterprises. To the contrary, the natural laws of the social sciences, including religions, conform to the "long waves" of human experience and may be impudently violated by Greedy Bastards (GBs) who think only of the short term. Nothing stands in their way except an informed public opinion, which we do not have. (2) The great mass of the people, some of whom might be tempted to become GBs if they had the wit to be successful in that vocation, are not naturally disposed to waste natural resources nor to incur excessive debt. But, an unbalanced economic system, either free market or centrally controlled, in which Say's Law is subverted, can coerce the great majority of the people to despoil their natural resources while incurring excessive debt at every level of organization in both the public and private sectors of the economy. It is not "the economy, stupid," it is "the unbalanced economy, stupid," which defines the status quo in the United States. This, I think, is a more reasonable explanation of human perversity than just "passing the buck" by claiming that human nature is inherently corrupt, perverse, and contemptible as claimed by some religions and most members of the DDotSQ. (3) If we can accept that the great mass of the people are not perverse and corrupt, are not disposed to waste their natural resources, and would not burden future generations with excessive debt; then it follows that the century old status quo in the United States of a 4% and up unemployment rate, a 2.3% and up inflation rate, and a 5% of GDP deficiency of purchasing power among parenting households is not the will of God, but more likely the will of those among us who think only of their short term advantage and believe with Keynes that, "in the long run we are all dead." (4) Without a technically valid conceptual model of an economic system as illustrated by the attached file Fig_4_+_8.gif to inform the public's discretion, the status quo will continue until the United States becomes two nations under one government, one small and rich, the other large and poor. The attached Fig 10b.gif shows the CPI profile of the US economy from Colonial times through 1969. Bob Bronson's chart completed the picture with the CPI profile from 1870 through 2001. A best fit line on Bob's chart showed a 3.3%/year inflation rate from the 1890s through 2001, which continues to date. The attached Fig_4_+_8.gif covers a lot of ground. But Fig 4 shows only three ways to impair the natural performance of an industrial society: By withholding the capital investment, by withholding the human investment, and by increasing indirect taxes while decreasing direct taxes. Fig 8 puts the burden of taxes and debt service in clear perspective at every level of earned income, and calls our attention to the purpose of direct taxation in the public sector and the G&A rate in the private sector. That purpose is, to remove fixed costs from the competitive calculation and let every productive asset (capital or human) enter the market with constant or decreasing returns to scale. Henry Carter Adams gave several pages to that question in his 1887 paper, RELATION OF THE STATE TO INDUSTRIAL ACTION. Fig 1 shows that low rates of capital investment (Hollow boxes) correlate strongly with low rates of human investment (Hollow diamonds) in the US and the UK. If anyone has a current copy of the World Bank's ATLAS, how much has the picture changed since 1994? There are few subjects that reach from the Book of Numbers to this week's copy of THE ECONOMIST and then to every nation in the world. Why would anyone want to talk about anything else? Kind regards, Wes Burt --^---------------------------------------------------------------- This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84IaC.bcVIgP.YXJjaGl2 Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] TOPICA - Start your own email discussion group. FREE! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/create/index2.html --^----------------------------------------------------------------
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