There are two transitions here. Most people will be interested in the "transition in" to Timesizing. The transition in involves an adventitious private-sector stage (already started) that introduces the first phase of the five-phase public-sector stage.
A "transition out" at the end, in and beyond Phase 5, matches the "transition in" at the beginning of the Timesizing program. Timesizing points to a whole series of successor-programs to accommodate the higher expectations it generates. Let's not make the usual naive assumption that there's only one program or step leading to Permanent Perfection. Henry George, Karl Marx and many others made that mistake and it's time we smartened up a bit. The one constant in social evolution is rising expectations (see books by U.Chicago's Philip M. Hauser), and once we solve the huge problem in front, the not-as-huge problem behind it, previously hidden, looms just as large. Another reason for designing a series of programs instead of a single program is simply to avoid boredom, accommodate people's need for newness and their interest in progress.
We are constantly "operating on our own retinas" in the area of socio-economic design, so let's just list the next four programs (allowing the round number of a century for each of the total of five programs gives us a 500-YEAR VIEW in total), each one entirely parallel to Timesizing with essentially the same five program phases repeatedly mapped over onto the next program and adapted to its key value and terminology in a sort of search-and-replace operation:
- Timesizing balances the time dimension, that is, worktime per person. This is the program that dissolves the concentration of market-demanded working hours on fewer and fewer people as automation and robotization proceed. This program ends the coexistence of overwork and underemployment, and solves the age-old economic problem of joblessness or unemployment, and begins the flexing up of skills and all kinds of craft distinctions and obstacles to credentialing. This program is a bit of an evolutionary hurdle for humanity since it involves a number of "first's": first equalizing on a range instead of a point, first clear distinction between per-person (governable) and per-job (volatilizable) variables, first clear distinction between inflationary and deflationary incentive, first attempt to balance same without curtailing growth, first step toward obeying imperative to switch from quantitative to qualitative growth....
- Using the structure of the same five phases we used in the Timesizing program, we can now start on the money dimensions, of which there are three: flowing money or income per person, standing money or wealth per person, and potential money or credit per person. Balancing the first of the three, income per person, solves the first and most accessible kind of poverty, income-poverty.
- Then we balance standing money or wealth per person, which obsoletes poverty in the ordinary sense. Each program facilitates the transfer of marketable skills.
- Then we balance potential money or credit per person, which obsoletes bankruptcy.
- Then perhaps we balance credibility per person and disparities less familiar today as problems....
You get the drift...the process may involve an infinite series of variables. If we naively budget a century for each of these programs, we're looking 500 years into the future at this point, not based on quantitative mathematical projections but on qualitative linguistic projections which can break through the 10-50 year limit on quantitative projections. But observing the very long-term tendency of major human sharing mechanisms to start slowly and gradually speed up (see our Football of Time), we can bet that earlier programs will take more than a century and later ones less. Some points to bear in mind about these disparity-balancing programs are:
- The variables involved in future problematic disparities fade from view into realms that seem vague to us today (for example, the sixth might be celebrity per person, ending most people's current fate of total obscurity). Distant future realms don't concern us much in our current "primitive" age, except one. Perhaps we should mention this deep-background disparity. It is similar to the skills that are worked-on program after program but it will probably have to be the focus of its own program eventually. It concerns the concentration of geriatric services and spare-parts technology and, daadadadaaaa...longevity per person. Recent discoveries about the dark energy in the universe indicate that unqualified IMMORTALITY (see also last point below) may be impossible (see article "Times of Our Lives" by Robert L. Jaffe in Natural History magazine for Nov/2006, p.26 ff.) but we can certainly live very, very much longer than we do now. Paradoxically, this development will require much greater acceptance of our own finitude (cf. Kevorkianism). And of course this development will urgently require ways to deny access to the Hitlers and Idi Amins and Dick Cheneys that sporadically emerge - specimens that are so backward and destructive to the well-being of our species as a whole that the sooner they are encysted, the better. And following our general guideline of sustainability under which non-self-supporting individuals are denied the vote (though there will be more and more imagination invested in enabling their self-support - remember the secular reduction in worktime that we are finally reaping once timesizing swings into operation), destructively backward individuals will be denied access to "heroic" measures, defined by referendum, of life lengthening.
- In general, social evolution throughout is offsetting the extreme disadvantages - and the extreme advantages, which can be just as disastrous - of the accident of birth, and substituting greater and greater harmonious diversity, and its variability and adaptability byproducts, in place of unlimited and eventually dysfunctionally extreme disparity.
- As each giant disparity in front is balanced and dissolved, the one behind, previously hidden, looms just as large and we see rising expectations at work (see above).
- The balancings are always on a general per-person basis, which is the province of government, and never on a detailed per-job basis, which is the province of the free market. As we stabilize the per-person side of each dimension, we render it safe for the per-job side to volatilize, and volatilize it does, meaning that the free market becomes freer.
- With each balancing process, particularly in the money dimensions, we build an uncontroversial basis for putting a dollar value on human life, starting with a safe range of income per person and then backing it up with a safe range of wealth per person, credit per person, etc. (see "Putting a dollar value of life: When murder victims' families filed lawsuits," by Jeffrey Zaslow, 8/19/2004 Wall St. Journal, D1).
- Eventually we're going to be able to centrifuge access to voluntary immortality and mortality, borne on centuries of incrementally improved spare-parts technology and auto-immune manipulation (see "Where is thy sting?" op ed by Nicholas Kristof, 8/12/2003 New York Times, A21, and also "High tech daydreamers investing in immortality," by James Gorman, 11/01/2003 NYT, A13, and also *MethuselahMouse.org.). But we'll have to become a lot more flexible, versatile and extended in our self-interest before that, both globally (synchronically) with empathy for other linguistic groups, and timewise (diachronically) with empathy toward generations in the very long term future. That is the ultimate purpose of Timesizing and its followup balancing programs, which, as far as we know, constitute the only step-by-step plan currently published that can achieve this goal. It's a very, very long process, but so are the DNA instructions that construct us and every other complex living thing on this planet.
The series of dimensions and balancings gets, from our limited 21st-century view, increasingly vague and rarified, but then, we're still at a barbaric stage in the evolution of intelligent life where it's "right" and "smart" to randomly throw hundreds and thousands of people out of their livelihoods (as when we call mass layoffs not merely "downsizing," but "smartsizing" and "rightsizing") on the basis of some demented notion of "efficiency"! With such a definition of efficiency, the sooner each economy shrinks its workforce (and therefore, simultaneously, its consumer base) to a single unit, the more "efficient" it is. As Sismondi riffs in a c.1820 letter to Ricardo, "Indeed? Wealth is everything, men are absolutely nothing? What, is wealth itself only something in relation to taxes? In truth then, there is nothing more to wish for than that the king, remaining alone on the island, by constantly turning a crank, might produce, through automata, all the output of England." Since an economy cannot exist with only one producer-consumer, this is tantamount to saying that the sooner an economy self-destructs, the better. By extension, the sooner after cell division or hatching or birth each life form commits suicide, the more "efficient" it is. Not so. An economy's existence depends on a balance of centripetal and centrifugal forces, same as a moon, planet, star, superstar, or "black hole" megastar....
For the sake of envisioning and prediction, we schematize the whole Timesizing program as five 10-year private-sector phases followed by the five 10-year public-sector phases, making for a nice round 100-year program. Then each of the next dimensions to be balanced can use the same 5-phase program as Timesizing, in the same private, then public sector order, and the same 50+50 year time estimate. In the event, earlier programs will take longer and later programs will take shorter and shorter as we get used to this method of accelerated progress in the most critical and meaningful dimensions.
Of course the neat-sounding estimate of 10 years per phase is just for convenience, because social evolution is never so neat. In practice, even within each balancing program, the earlier private-sector stage is likely to be longer that the later public sector stage because the public education task in each program is daunting, and each whole program requires that we get ordinary people thinking about what amounts to, for them, economic science fiction (sci fi). And some indication of the inherent difficulty of that project is provided by considering how rare economic sci fi is. The whole Star Trek series of TV series had maybe two episodes focused on economics - the 2-part "Past Tense" episode of Deep Space 9 and the episode about unionizing Quark's bar. Once when Phil emailed a Star Trek producer {Rick Berman) once to broach the subject, he was ridiculed. This from somebody who presumably prides himself on his imagination. Ha! All that most sci fi writers and producers ever came up with is evermore technological whizbang - and war. And we called this "imagination." It's nothing but disgraceful and embarrassing.
The important thing here is to articulate and stress the principles, which is to repeat the some of the same things over and over again in the hopes they will sink in:
- Gradualism - rushing social change is a cure worse than the disease - witness Russia's 2-week transition to "free market" resulting in a gangster economy (thanks Jeff Sachs, you moron)
- Minimum necessary departure from status quo at each point
- If we can possibly stay where we are longer, let's do so, but if we can't let's take the next step, and only the next step
The private-sector stage is based on two things - econometric models and working models, such as these working models.
Quick Reference. The 5 phases of the public-sector stage of the Timesizing program (bear in mind there's a long private-sector stage preceding that) are:
1. Referendums, to broadly define unemployment and set target rates
2. Corporate overtime tax with an exemption for OJT and hiring
3. Individual workoholic tax with an exemption for mentoring and employing
4. Making the workweek vary inversely with unemployment, newly defined to include welfare, disability, homelessness, prisons, forced part time and self employment...
5. If the workweek gets too low too fast, shifting the pressure to imports, immigrants, or births
6.=new 1. If the public doesn't want to squeeze imports immigrants or births, we move on to the next program, "Paysizing," and go through the same private and public sector stages of 5 phases apiece with "income and poverty" instead of "employment and joblessness".
For more details, see our campaign piece alias social-software manual, Timesizing, Not Downsizing, which is available from *Amazon.com online.
Questions, comments, feedback? Phone 617-623-8080 (Boston) or email us.
The Timesizing® Program