Timesizing®  not downsizing
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DEFINITION:
TIMESIZING is cutting the workweek, to spread employment & maintain markets, not cutting the workforce - which cuts markets. Timesizing means more jobs, shorter hours, same pay, cuz you've cut the labor surplus. Check out our timesizing blog and our time trilogy.

    To "save the world," first we need the right ideas. We can't start with hunger, because no one with money is hungry. But we can't start with lack of money (poverty), because no one with a good job lacks money. We must start with jobs. This website creates jobs by economic design, which we define as the answer to the question, "What's the smallest change that would gain the greatest good for the greatest number?" The new design will be simpler than the tangled web we've woven and there will actually be a series of designs to satisfy ever-rising expectations. The first will answer the urgent question: How do we reverse our economic downspin? and the strategic question: Is there a point in the process of concentrating our national income and wealth in the top brackets where the process starts to undermine itself?
    We also answer: How do we get wartime prosperity without war? Wartime prosperity depended on a labor shortage that harnessed market forces to raise wages, spread the national income to the bottom 80% who wanted & needed to spend it, and boosted spending=demand & marketable productivity=sustainable investments. But how do we get a labor shortage without killing people? We had actually found a way before the war interrupted and upstaged it = workweek reduction (1938-39-40: hrs/wk 44-42-40, unemployment 19-17.2-14.6%)? - Walter Reuther called it 'fluctuating adjustment of the workweek against unemployment.' Pursuing this strategy solves two puzzles:
    (1) When introducing technology, how can CEOs, without makework, maintain or increase employment and markets instead of downsizing jobs & the consumer markets & investments they support and dragging government (& taxpayers) into the role of employer and charity of last resort?  (Bonus question: Is there some way to check inflation under full employment - without checking growth by raising interest?)   (2)  How do we then shift from maximizing consumption to save our economy, to minimizing consumption to save our ecosystem? (Taboo question: How do we stop the unlimited consolidation of our national income & wealth among the top .01% of our population from proceeding beyond the point where it starts cannibalizing its own consumer base?)
              Two answers, two 'gears':  (1) Timesizing = switch from trimming the workforce and the consumer base to trimming the workweek as long as unemployment is too high or wages too low; make honest self-support easier, not taxpayer-support and charity and crime, and – crucial – automatically convert overtime into training and jobs.  (2) Once everyone is included in the worksharing system, GDP growth becomes optional instead of systemically necessary, because for the first time, growth can be limited without starving the now well-employed 'poor' or clobbering the consumer base (and the economy that's based on it). So then we can cut the workweek further to downshift production & consumption and save the planet without killing the economy. (And then, based on this work-balancing program, we design programs to balance money.)
              Use this website for worst-case planning, economic design, and news on the current economic "recovery" as spun by both Right and Left, critiqued from the 3rd way viewpoint of a student of ecology, linguistics and history.
Features:  • missed recent hope/doom du jour?   check out past hopes/dooms du jour
• bibliography  • site map  • links  • time trilogy: • vol.I • vol.II • vol.III  • the big question 
• makework  • the history of the American workweek • 30-hr. bill  • business 'cycles'  • courses 
New features - class in America, growing disparity, worst case plan, economic design
Timesizing means full employment without makework or inflation.
 How? By adjusting the workweek down & up - instead of firing & hiring - based on a comprehensive blueprint for a green economy & a new worktime economics where, 100 years from now, people will be...
  • repeating our basic economic slogan - "No Overtime Alone!" - in other words, if you opt for overtime, you make sure the skill bottleneck behind it gets opened up by mentoring a trainee
  • asking one another, "What's the workweek this month?" - in other words, work pressures are dynamically shared as incoming technology cuts their duration but boosts their stress
  • accommodating workoholics while blocking inflation, by unleashing "love to work" incentive (deflationary) while capping the money motive (inflationary), & balancing the two
    • For over six years (1999-2004 and 2009...), we at the Timesizing Wire have been tracking what's rancid beneath the "recovery" via America's top two newspapers, the Wall Street Journal on the right & the New York Times on the left (often from *Wainwright Bank reading room in hip Davis Square, Somerville, Mass.), with occasional input from the London Economist on the right & the Boston Globe on the left. We pick up timesizing stories wherever we find them, but mainly from Google News Search. Then we paused for four years to establish a Canadian branch when the USA failed to get rid of the suicidal Bush regime in 2004, and now that the US has gone back to the slower Democratic rate of self-deterioration, we've resumed our daily updates.
    Timesizing’s 3rd way is centrist and deep green, not just light or pinkish green like the Green Party's grocery list of ad hoc, unintegrated & unprioritized issues. Timesizing satisfies the right with smaller government and bigger firmer markets & the left with a simpler stronger social safety net that makes the right clean up their own recessions instead of continuously inducing them by privatizing and concentrating profits & nationalizing and centrifuging losses. Our Timesizing solution is based on working models, American history (especially 1933 ), on economic design, on ecology, and on worktime economics, linguistics, Limits to Growth, and Buckminster Fuller.  The deep green center is the future, and we strategize for the next 100-1000 years, not just the next three months (quarterly report) or four years (U.S. presidential term). And we are always and everywhere under construction, & asterisked links take you *outside our site.

    the problem, vs.
    the timesizing solution
             (in deteriorating stages)                               (in stepped enhancements)                    
  • long workweek; short vacation
    		•
    clue 1
  • electronic democracy vs PACs & lobbyists
  • biz downsizing; govt makework
  • market reinvestment vs corporate welfare
  • takeovers;  bankruptcy;  prison
    • clue 2
  • job&wage insurance vs gov't jobs programs
  • unemployment;  homelessness
  • geared to problem vs emotional guesswork
  • forced retirement;  disability
    • clue 3
  • plugging leaks vs Stinnes and Malthus
  • suicides;  headlines from hell
    		•
  • transitions vs abrupt cures worse than disease

    • Pie in the sky?  Click on Design Solutions for rebuttals of Impractical!  Unconstitutional!  Socialist!  Uncompetitive!  Inflationary!  Anti-small business!  Lump of Labor Fallacy!...
    And did we mention the Working Models?

    For details, see our social-software manual, in simple language -


    This numbered, first edition is available from *Amazon.com.


    More angles on Timesizing
    (Join shorter worktime e-list by emailingswt-digest-request@swt.org with 'subscribe' as msg)

    Bibliography | Audiences | Research Priorities | Phil's Bio
    Politics |The Forgotten Republican Key to Small Government | Sayings
    Investment Advice | Why should I be forced to stop work at a certain #hrs/wk?!
    America's Massive Pervasive Makework | Letting off steam | Opus Errata
    Timesizing Courses | Website History | Website Reactions | Guest Book
    This website, best viewed with *Mozilla Firefox, *Netscape or *Explorer, is dedicated to the memory of John Kowal of Buffalo & Brookline, our feistiest friend.  The website is under constant micro-enhancement & experimentation.
    • basic setup was by John MacMillan of Billerica, Mass., USAF Ret. & Mass. GOP webmaster
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