- We say that technology creates more jobs than it destroys, but at the same time that it's more efficient and should take over evermore work formerly done by humans (especially now that it's incarnate in robots). Maybe we better make up our minds before our doubletalk eradicates our consumer base and ruins our economy.
- We say we want growth, but in responding to technology, we support downsizing and not timesizing (trimming jobs instead of trimming workhours and keeping everyone employed). But downsizing reduces not only our workforce but also our consumer base and therefore also our consumption and our production - and that means, our growth.
- 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.
- 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, and thus decrease family time.
- 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.)
- 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."
- 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."
- 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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