Timesizing® Associates
©2003-2011 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing.com Party, Harvard Square POBox 117, Cambridge MA 02238 USA (617) 623-8080

Contradictions in Economic "Science" in the Early 2100s

  1. We say we want growth, but in responding to technology, we support downsizing (trimming jobs-wages-sales)
    instead of timesizing (trimming workhours and keeping everyone employed & spending).
    Growth is UPsizing, not DOWNsizing, no matter how much we dress it up as rightsizing, smartsizing, "creative destruction"=Schumpeter's offering on the altar of management testosterone, collateral damage (recession) notwithstanding...
    and there's NO WAY to get UPsizIng (growth) out of DOWNsizing (layoffs).

    We can, however, get UPsizing out of TIMEsizing,
    because timesizing maintains or increases the number of potential consumer-spenders who are getting funded by job-earnings
    and timesizing maintains or increases pay levels by avoiding today's flood of resumes for every job opening, each resume underbidding the other. Spoiled employers perceive this jobseeker-jobopening balance as terrible "shortages" of labor but while loudly complaining, they're bidding against one another for good help and raising wage levels and preventing the national income from defaulting into the fatal upward funnel to The One Percent who have far more than they care (or are even able) to spend and eventually more than they can even invest.
    Thus they begin functioning solely as suicidal money coagulants and the whole system goes into recession and depression.
    The lengthening time that The One Percent is taking to find attractive (or ANY) investments corelates to (or bolder, causes)
    the lengthening time that the ninety-nine percent is taking to find attractive (or ANY) employment.

  2. We say technology creates more jobs than it destroys, but at the same time we say it should take over more & more jobs (especially now we're going from automation to robotization). Maybe we better figure out who's going to buy all the stuff the robots are producing before we take downsizing to its logical conclusion, eradicate our consumer base and ruin our economy. As Walter Reuther answered to Henry Ford's taunt, "Let's see you unionize these robots!" - "Let's see you sell them cars."

  3. We say we want growth, but our method of controlling inflation is raising interest rates which discourages business borrowing and expansion - and growth. (Timesizing has a more natural and growth-compatible method - see Phase 3.)

  4. We say we want growth - however, merely in order to enhance the otherwise functionless pecking order of the wealthy, we support sales taxes and not graduated income and estate taxes. And as Milton Friedman says, you get less of whatever you tax. So sales taxes give us less sales, decelerate our currency circulation, and weaken the markets for the productivity we need for sustainable investments. Thus supposedly conservative Republicans are contradicting their major prophet, Milton Friedman, and created an unsustainable "Leona Helmsley" society and economy where taxes are just for little people - but "gods" like her don't spend, so spending (econ: "consumption") declines, marketable productivity declines, sustainable investment declines and...the economy declines.
    Basically, the more sales taxes, the less sales, whereas, the more graduated the income and estate taxes, the less deceleration of the currency and deactivation of the money supply - and the more sales.

  5. We say we believe in equal opportunity and, with the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal." But by running a Helmsley economy and a Cheney society where the top wealthy are gods who neither have to pay taxes or obey laws (eg: against torture, against the awarding of unbid contracts, against untaxed personal income), we are opening up a wider and wider "income gap" and unequal society, which even the relatively blind Economist Magazine has realized is a multidimensional problem. "Income gap" is still a safely unactionable term, turning it into yet another on our list of unsolvable problems aka Acts of God, and no one is yet calling it by its actionable name, "over-concentration of income" (and of wealth/standing money, and of credit/potential money).
    These remnants of old pecking orders resurface and hamstring their respective societies, dragging them down. It's like in each social-science era, a new value-centrifuge elicits another human hierarchy. Rome was ahead of the Sumerian citystate because at least the Roman temple and palace were two separate buildings with two separate hierarchies aka pecking orders, while Sumer (and the Incas too?) had only the priest-king. Rome had grades of priests and grades of administrators, such as governors and procurators, etc.
    Notice that by contradicting our own founding principle of equal opportunity and denying that everyone starts with the same chances and accepting that people have different chances, we have given up the struggle to lessen both the UPside AND THE DOWNSIDE of the accident of birth. That differential or disparity is therefore increasing toward subspeciation within our species and even complete speciation, the splitting of our species. I believe in that direction lies unsustainability, as many science fiction authors testify (eg: Eloi and Morlocks). Two problems with this: (1) The Morlocks consume their consumers, as we do during war by killing chunks of our workforce = inefficient, wasteful. (2) By destabilizing our world with (sub)speciation, we contradict our ultimate human dream = secure, increasingly long life, and eventually, possibly, immortality.

  6. We say we believe in equal opportunity and a level playing field, but sports leagues that HAVE equal opportunity and a level playing field for all member teams at the beginning of every season RESET every team's score to zero at the beginning of every season; otherwise, they would have cumulatively UNequal opportunity and a increasingly steeply sloped and unfairly tilted playing field.
    Only during the world wars have we had anything approaching an annual RESET of every market player's opportunity to a basic common level such as zero - because only during these wars have we had steeply graduated income and wealth (dba "estate") taxes. No war, no reset. No reset, no level playing field and no equal opportunity.

  7. We say we want more population, but we don't want it where it counts - in wage-earning employment that would give us a stronger consumer base. Instead, we foster unmarketable productivity by downsizing jobs (and consumers) in response to worksaving technology instead of merely downsizing the workweek, whose length is immaterial to anything except management skills.

  8. We say we're for freedom and liberty, but we resist putting any limits on worktime per person, thus reversing over a century of advances in the most basic freedom, free time, without which the other freedoms are inaccessible and/or meaningless.

  9. We say we're for family values, but we make no effort to increase family time, and we support much rhetoric and many efforts to "work harder" - that is, longer, thus radically decreasing family time.

  10. We say we believe in marginalism, but we apply it only to prices and not to the more important areas of power, income and wealth. Basically, the "margin" is the point of diminishing returns, the line of satiation, the level where supply begins to overwhelm demand. Marginalism is about the diminishing utility of things in high concentrations, the fact that you can indeed get too much of a good thing. But the nearsighted among the power elite who don't know when enough's enough and don't want to brake their acquisitiveness, ever, have induced their key dependent-profession, economists, to completely ignore this aspect of marginalism and preach the opposite: you need (infinitely) high concentrations of capital to invest in large projects, never mind loss of control by local populations, never mind loss of human scale, never mind ecological impact and definitely never mind "small is beautiful."

  11. We can't lower the workweek because the devil finds work for idle hands to do. We need the discipline of the workforce by controlling more hours, not less, of people's lives.
    Answer - How effective can this approach to discipline be if it has resulted in a prison population that has broken all our own historic records and is about to break records worldwide? The obvious alternative view states "the devil finds work for hungry idle hands to do a lot faster than well-fed leisurely hands."

  12. We need a wide disparity of wealth to incentivate the whole population -> we need the rich to model goals for the whole population.
    Answer - How effective can this approach to incentive be when so many of the wealthy have not worked for their wealth, or have even been rewarded lavishly for screwing up, like Abraham Gossman's $25,000,000 golden parachute from MediTrust of Needham, Mass.? What this approach motivates is more and more flouting of the rules. Why? Because as demonstrated by people from OJ Simpson to Bush Jr. with his hundreds of self-exemptions from laws he signs, the wealthy have no rules and flout any laws they want. Result? No feedback loop at the highest levels in the control systems of our economy, and again, a record-breaking prison population. We have made it easier and more attractive - in a word, more incentivated - to make a dishonest living than an honest one, and that is a ticket to self-destruction.
For more details, our laypersons' handbook Timesizing, Not Downsizing is available from *Amazon.com online or from this website.

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