To Bill Gates, Michael Eisner
& America's tight-knit little circle of CEOs

And Michael, you're basically a good guy who's swept away with the Fantasy of You - planning ahead... a million projects... record salary... but you're focused small - just Disney & Tentacles - and there's so much more....

So we want to present a really big, worthwhile fantasy to you both - a technology-borne heaven on earth for everyone - including the folks languishing in our bulging prison system and not just the still-employed folks who can afford the $10-20 (or whatever it's gone up to now) to get into Disneyland or the $200-100 (or whatever it's come down to now) to buy the latest version version of Windows.

Gentlemen, we have flopped in our overall joint venture.  Together, we have failed to build an America that can even support the markets for our own investment targets.  Standard economists have not been honest with us - they've been focused on the next quarter or, at most, the next presidential term, and frankly they don't spend a lot of time critiquing their own overall timeframe, because at the moment, that's paying their bills, if you know what we mean.

But here are some angles on a longer term solution, much longer -

1. The sustainability angle, or, beyond the next quarter and the next presidential term, to truly geological timespans
2. The predictability angle, or, beyond zigzagging markets - the sine wave of boom and bust
3. Keeping one species of...us, or, beyond the self-confinement of our species involved in letting 1% of the population hold 99% of the wealth, wiping out the middle class and widening the income gap between "the Eloi and the Morlocks"
4. Debugging standard economics with a new paradigm from worktime economics

The question is, how do we solidify a bubble? A bubble is a top heavy economy.  An economy where people are no longer investing in the "real" or "grounded," but are merely investing in investing.

What's the problem with that?  It's self-terminating.  Why?  Because of a much neglected principle of neo-classical economics - the marginal utility of wealth.  This is the idea that, "the more concentration, the less circulation," to the point that the compaction of wealth gets so dense and intense that it actually suctions the markets away from its own investments.  The storage requirements of money outrun its exchange requirements, but since the only possible residence in which to meaningfully store money - so that it retains its value - is exchange, ... well, when storage overwhelms storage containers, you get what we euphemistically call a "blivvy" (defined as 10 pounds of sh*t in a 5-pound bag) - the containers burst and the stored material is wasted.

And despite cosmetic attempts on the part of you, Bill, and other mega-rich to centrifuge your wealth via philanthropy, the concentration of global capital is so far outstripping your discretionary centrifugation, and so far outstripping global consumer markets, that it is approximating an economic Black Hole.  A Black Hole is so small, dense and concentrated that nothing leaves its central massive core, not even light waves, and nothing can exist within its 'event horizon' without getting sucked into that central core and unimaginably compacted.  We call all this 'astrophysical economics.'  With this metaphor, we describe a top heavy economy and introduce a new paradigm into economic theory.

Can such an economy be adjusted and rebalanced by further investment or even philanthropy?  No.  The vast majority of investing today, and all philanthropy, is discretionary.  Let's develop a few synonyms for "discretionary" to show the problem.  "Discretionary" means arbitrary, capricious, unreliable, speculative, characterized by absentee ownership [ref. Veblen] and poor cybernetics (feedback).  In short, far too little of the astronomically concentrated wealth in the world today is automatically earmarked for taking care of business, for minding the store, for nourishing the fundamentals, for expanding the consumer base.

In pre-depression periods like ours, quicksilver capital is constantly scanning for milch cows, the fatter the better.  Inevitably, "fat" becomes a matter, more and more, of hype, and global capital becomes more and more the victim of hype, much of it its own.  But why is there so much more capital zooming around during these periods than during other parts of the long business cycle (the Kondratieff)?  Why do so few people with so much say over so much money have more and more trouble separating out the hype and finding solid investment targets?

But what are "solid investment targets"?  What are the "fundamentals," "business," "the store"?  The answer seems to lie in the concept of balance.  We don't need supply-side.  We don't need demand-side.  We need "balance-side" economics.

How do we get balance?  Well, what is it that's unbalanced?  Obviously, it's the centripetal forces on wealth.  We can chit-chat about the "trickle down" effect - how wealth "trickles down" to the poor, but meanwhile, wealth is POURING, gushing, flooding up and concentrating further and further among the rich.  The centrifugal forces on wealth are clearly much much weaker than the centripetal forces.

How do we balance them?  And how do we balance them systemically, and not merely discretionarily, because as we've argued, discretion is not enough.  The New Deal tried to balance wealth discretionarily by federal government action in the 1930s, but the experiment only proved that the necessary magnitudes would not be reached by discretionary investment, not even by a strong central government, in the absence of war.  The New Deal did not solve the Great Depression until World War II began, so there will always be a question as to whether the New Deal solved it or the War did.  Wars always move governments into "New Deal" levels of respect for labor anyway, since wars suck up manpower, and make it scarce.

That is the clue.  To engage market forces to systemically balance markets and capital, we need a perceived scarcity of labor to flexibly and gradually raise wages and spending.  And we don't mean the "wages" of top executives, but of everyone, particulary ordinary people who actually spend their money instead of just looking for bigger and sturdier lockers to store it in, lockers that inevitably become cold-storage lockers as the frequency-of-transaction of the wealth within them plummets.

How do we create a shortage of labor without killing people (which is war's ultimate method)?  Ironically, FDR snubbed the pathway to the solution in his first 100 days as president.  The solution is to ration the availability of labor to the job market, ideally to ration it flexibly in a market-oriented way by giving control over to its opposite.

So can we design a system where the availability of labor is controlled by the availability of jobs (and markets - since we need markets to provide jobs on one hand and on the other, to provide solid investment targets for the wealth we want to store - and thereby necessarily concentrate)? The project raises two practical questions:

1. What are the minimum market levels (i.e., velocity of circulation, propensity to consume) that we need to nurture and maintain in order to securely (and sustainably) store our current levels of capital (bearing in mind that the "marginal utility of wealth" means we tend to starve markets as we concentrate wealth)?
2. Coming at it from the other side, what is the maximum level of wealth concentration that our present markets can securely and sustainably support?  What measures and units can we use to gauge these parameters?

And overall, how do we maximize consensus along the path and minimize controversiality?  And how avoid getting too fast a solution?  That is, how do we respect the principle of 'minimum necessary departure from status quo at each point' and 'gradualism in all things'?

One situation that could answer all these seemingly intimidating design questions at once, would be if we could automate the solution by tying it to a really appropriate natural (= market) phenomenon that could simultaneously target, trigger, pace, and finance the whole operation?  So what is the best investment targetter, etc.?  And assuming the only way to adjust labor supply without killing people is via the adjustment of worktime per person per time unit, how do we tie that in?  For example, how would we design the workweek level in our society to adjust, gradually and automatically, to our level of technology (which seems to be the big driver of change)?

(Jumping ahead, our best answer to all this is overtime.  We take the incidence of overtime work throughout the economy as the most appropriate and market-oriented mechanism by which to target investment, which thereby becomes re-investment.  Thus our answer to the questions "What are 'solid investment targets'?" and "What are the 'fundamentals,' 'business,' 'the store'?" is - the market-determined incidence of overtime work.  And in answer to how to "take care of it," "how to solidify the Internet (or any) bubble," we say, reinvest it in jobs (and wages and spending).  Convert overtime into jobs by reinvesting overtime profit and earnings in training and hiring.  Then if there are still people without jobs, who represent wasted/inactive consumer base, cut the workweek, thus expanding overtime (and job reinvestment, and wages and spending and markets).  Thus overtime not only targets investment, but triggers, paces, funds and sizes it to the most relevant areas in the economy.)

Now, that being said, if you're doing all you can to start heaven on earth systemically, and you still have big bucks left over, we can't believe your boring and pathetic efforts to give money away. Here are some real imaginative projects that would make your name much longer-term than "taking coals to Newcastle" and just patronizing the boringboringBORING projects of existing charities or giving money to the already richest tech school on the planet (MIT):

1. *Dvorak Keyboard - "We humans think we're so intelligent and yet" our keyboards are still QWERTY?! = designed for inefficiency!! August Dvorak scientifically designed a *maximally efficient one in the 1930s. Fund America's and Britain's conversion to it! (This will get you a lot of friends among all future computer users until we have perfect voice recognition systems.)

2. *Simplified English Spelling (SES) or even the *Shavian Alphabet - We humans think we're so intelligent and yet our trade language (English) has a spelling non-system that is as clunky, relative to real functionality, as the Chinese pictographic script is to the Latin alphabet! Fund America's and Britain's conversion to SES, or even the completely different, completely efficient Shavian Alphabet, designed in the 1950s with funds from a bequest from George Bernard Shaw's will. (This will get you a lot of friends among everyone who has to learn ESL - English as a Second Language.)

3. Fix the calendar -
   • "The calendar year is not evenly divisible into quarters;
   • the months range...from 28 to 31 days...
   • their beginnings and endings occur on all days of the week;
   • the weeks are split between months.
   "[Both of two] recent proposals...are based on the period of 364 days, a number evenly divisible by 4, 7, and also 13. An extra day is added each year in such a way as not to disturb the sequence of weekdays, and another is added every 4 years in the same manner, except in the century years not evenly divisible by 400....
   1. "The 13-month perpetual calendar...divides the year into 13 months of 28 days each. In this plan a calendar for one month would serve for every other month forever if it remembered when to add the two stabilizing days. This proposal met with approval for a time, but lost favor because it seemed too drastic a change from the present calendar..\..
      [We can well imagine! "Too easy." It probably evoked a huge smear campaign from the calendar makers since, in a non-Timesizing world, it would disemploy them. But in the light of this sensible proposal, our current calendar itself appears as much a bundle of artificial makework as the Japanese and Chinese pictographic scripts compared to alphabets, or as the "petition of the candlemakers" or the "negative railroad" of Bastiat (see Ch. 7 of Robert Heilbroner's "Worldly Philosophers").]
   2. [In] the 12-month perpetual calendar known as the world calendar..., the four equal quarters of the year remain the same forever. Each quarter begins on Sunday and ends on Saturday. Its first month has 31 days, and its second and third months have 30 days each. One stabilizing day is added each year at the end of the fourth quarter; it is called Year-End Day, December Y, and is an extra Saturday. The second extra day is added every fourth year, with the usual exceptions, at the end of the second quarter; it is called Leap-Year Day, June L, and is also an extra Saturday. This plan is a more moderate change from the present calendar; it was disapproved, however, by the United Nations in 1956."
      [Alas, the 20th century was decidely time-reform averse. This whole wonderfully clear calendar quotation is from pp. 67-68 of Robert H. Baker's "An Introduction to Astronomy," 6th Edition (Van Nostrand: Princeton, NJ, 1961). This level of finetuning gives us hope that we will eventually make the centrigrade scale a bit more articulate in the human sensitivity range, say between freezing (32° F) and human body temperature (98.6° F).]

4. Open up diversity! -
   • Fund the design and construction of more interesting houses. Look at the pictures of Munchkin land, etc. in the original Oz books! Why do we have to live in these boring boxes all the time - especially these deathtrap highrises?! And let's colorize, for G*d's sake! Our city colors are as boring and chaotic relative to the future as the USSR's grayscape was to the USA in the 60s.
   • Teach the animals, starting with the most intelligent! - fund the language exchange programs between humans and bonobos, other great apes and down the primate line, dolphins and orcas and other cetaceans, elephants, pigs, crows.... Let's enrich the planet with more articulate viewpoints. Fund the training and building necessary for a dolphin-owned and operated restaurant. Let's get some imagination and progress into our boring world.

5. Open up historical accessibility! - fund historical reconstruction:
   • You want to really go down in history - and play with the prophecies? Make a standing offer to the parties in Jerusalem to completely finance carefully moving the mosque that's sitting on the site of Solomon's Temple to a less oppressive, more visually commanding site of their choice. Islam has Mecca. It's not right that they should co-opt the holiest location of one of the world's other great religions (actually the world's first "religion" in the sense of book-based cult) as well. And then, of course, a standing offer to rebuild the Temple as accurately as possible on its original foundations and provide whatever funds are wanted for its restoration to full service - with the possible exception of the animal sacrifice part in view of our rising respect for animals. (This will make Jews all over the world love Muslims, and you.)
   • How many of the seven wonders of the ancient world are left? Zip? Fund their research and rebuilding, one by one, starting with the Lighthouse of Pharos (we have pieces of it now) and the Colossus of Rhodes. (This will get you a lot of friends among tourists and historians.)

6. Then there are a couple of long-term goals -
   • Individual immortality - or as we prefer to call it, "voluntary mortality."
   • Species survival - providing for the survival of human beings (or whatever we are by 10B years hence) despite the death of the Sun.

7. [And a couple of special-interest goals -]
   The *Pennsy T1 - build a full-size model of the most futuristic looking steam locomotive America ever produced, the Pennsy T1 (see dustjacket picture on Paul North's American Steam Locomotives), of which every single example was stupidly scrapped in the late 40s and early 50s; find at least 40 miles of track for it and endow its maintenance and running for tourists. (This will get you a lot of friends among middle America - the railfan crowd that frequents diners.) Hell, endow the resurgence of clean efficient steam locomotion in America with enough dough and clout to shove it right down GM's throat if they start covert steam assassination again. (That will get you a lot of friends among renewable-fuels advocates, environmentalists and future generations.)

8. Mir - the first human space station and we're going to let it fall back in and burn up? Shame on us! Future generations will hold their heads in their hands and marvel at our stupidity if we don't preserve our first space station. You wanna make a name for yourself? SAVE MIR!!!!

For more information on how the future will balance the economy better and better and get further and further from the ridiculous and dangerous situation of one person having $100B (unless everyone else is averaging $500M0, see our laypersons' guide Timesizing, Not Downsizing is available from *Amazon.com online, or at bookstores in Harvard & Porter Squares, Cambridge, Mass., USA.