Why a worst-case plan?  There is a general, though tacit, assumption among TPTB (the powers that be) that the economic design in place is the best possible, because, hey, they're doing OK.  But millions of other people aren't, even though we're supposedly in an economic recovery, albeit "weak," "jobless" or "stumbling," etc.  So just in case the current "recovery" is actually a chronic recession like the Great Depression of 1929-1941, but with decades of spindoctoring skills to keep us asleep to the fact, even people who think we're in a real recovery have to agree that a worst-case plan is good insurance.

A chronic recession means No Recovery Without World War - unless we design an intelligent way to get the wartime prosperity without the world war this time.  Though Bush Jr. and the neo-cons did their best to mire as many other nations in Iraq with them as possible, it just didn't take, and the whole low-budget (except for their buddies) effort is thankfully serving only to funnel and fizzle murderous sAmerican testosterone in a region where it can't do too much harm except to its helpless victim and itself.  So the world war 'solution' isn't really catching-on this time.

So back to intelligent design (no relation to covert creationism). The story of the gradual improvement of the windmill in Holland, the trial-and-error development of the steam locomotive by people like Stevenson, Kirtley, Mallet and Webb, the saga of Edison's invention of the light bulb and Tesla's development of power generation - all these testify to the persistence and energy required for the design process, and - correct us if we're wrong - how much similar persistence and energy on the design front has been missing from field of economics. Indeed, most of the effort in economics seems to have been lavished on rationalizing the status quo for whomever's most benefitting from it at the moment, no matter how dysfunctional the whole system may be. Thus economics has gone from 50% theology when Joan Robinson wrote Economic Philosophy in 1962, to 70 or 80% today, with tremendous strides 'forward' in the area of obscuring and intimidating econometrics.

So what is (or should be) "economic design"?  It's halfway between very long-range forecasting and economic science fiction (a very rare genre in sci fi, judging from the only two episodes in the entire family of Star Trek series to be classifiable as such: "Past Tense" in 1995 on Star Trek - The Second Generation and an episode about unionizing Quark's bar on Star Trek - Deep Space 9). Not too many people get into it because it involves a rare skill - operating on one's own retinas. But at a time when mainstream economics ignores worktime as an economic variable, let alone a control variable, let alone the logical control variable for macroeconomics, we could hardly spend our time better than designing a new worktime economics centered on the uncoordinated supply of labor hours vs. employment hours in the immediate "market term."

What is the basis of our economic design? An all-points-priority, strategic, worktime history, which has come, astonishingly, to be completely ignored by every standard economist, economics department, business school, and financial analyst in the developed world, and by every general (non-labor) historian (including general economic historians, such as the late Charles Kindleberger of the U.S. and earlier William Cunningham and J.H. Clapham of Britain, and even by some labor historians, such as Francis Folsom, "Impatient Armies of the Poor," 1991). Just try to find entries like "workweek" or "hours of labor" in their indexes. The history of worktime has been ignored by every general historian, that is, except Benjamin Hunnicutt of the University of Iowa with his masterful Work Without End, 1988, which is our main history source for this website.

As you may have gathered, it is the mission of this website to correct that blindered thinking on the part of those we have naively trusted to run our affairs responsibly and intelligently.  That mission involves elaborating the basic 'storyline', philosophy, definitions, goals, scientific interconnections (e.g., with ecology) and database for this long-neglected but utterly critical path for meaningful human progress - instead of merely more technological glitz and quantitatively, but not qualitatively, extended human lifespans.

America's founding fathers, the framers of the Constitution, were political designers - they designed a new polity or political structure. They designed their values into political institutions. In the new (21st) century, we must apply this approach to our economy, difficult though that may be because of its being closer to determining our viewpoint - even more like operating on our own retinas. The many versions of the sentiment, "It's becoming appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity" (Einstein) reflect the relative primitiveness of our social software in contrast, say, to our computer software. Many of us are fed up with this design gap, but it's so easy to just "jump on our white horse and ride off in all directions." It actually takes a lot of 'sheer plod' to get anywhere on the project, and for sure "it's nasty work but somebody's got to do it."

Criteria for an adequate economic core design
• Must maximize the critical variable of all time for the long-term survival of large living systems (and probably also for the long-term continuity of non-living physical systems, such as solar systems and galaxies).
• Must offset the extremes of the accident of birth, bearing in mind that as intelligent life gets more sensitive, the extremes get less extreme. Note that this criterion, together with the previous, prevent subspeciation of homo sapiens sapiens, but integrate more and more diversity within the one species. Maximum sustainable diversity is embodied in the one criterion for full, voting citizenship; namely, self-support, regardless of handicap or disability.
• Must align with ecological principles, such as:
  • gradualness, i.e., minimum necessary departure from status quo at each point
  • homeostasis
  • unlimited (i.e., very long-term) sustainability
• Must self-transcend, to satisfy ever-rising expectations. This means no expectations of One Step to Permanent Perfection. And that means an adequate design must identify its context:
  • What it's building on and what it's replacing?
  • What will build on it and what will replace it?
  • In fact, what is the long-term series of variables of which it is balancing the currently critical one. This necessarily requires identifying the order of priority (logical/strategic) of current megaproblems and linking each of them with the relevant skewed variable.

What is the Holy Grail of economic designers? The Holy Grail of economic designers is the single all-sufficient control, for current levels of rising expectations and technological advance.

What is the chief R&D technique in economic design? In a word, BGOs (blinding glimpses of the obvious), one after another. Ask the obvious question, accept the obvious answer, then ask the question behind the question (i.e., the next obvious question). Build on the obvious. Stop fighting it, undervaluing it, demeaning it, dismissing it. There's even a book out on this approach, Robert Updegraff's The Power of the Obvious (Executive Press: Littleton NH, 1972), and it quotes George Bernard Shaw, "No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious." We get help on this from various techniques from the science of linguistics, such as identifying and completing gaps in paradigm. Examples: seniority vs. GAP, where GAP would equal "juniority*" (*unattested);   forefront vs aftrear*; length vs. shortth*, width vs. narrowth*; height vs. lowth*; weight vs. lightth*; velocity vs. tardocity*.

Of course, the BGO technique in economic design has to be coupled with a secondary R&D technique; namely, an appreciation of the inconspicuous. But that usually means, don't limit your search to where everyone else is looking. Remember the Emperor's "new clothes"? Remember the sighted man in the land of the blind? Look into the areas most people are overlooking or taking for granted. Then sit back and watch for the obvious. One helpful tactic is to regard every problem as containing within it the germ of its own solution. Our task is to "see" that solution within, just as Michaelangelo's task was to "see" his David or Moses sculpture in the uncarved blocks of marble before he sculpted them.

Today, incredible as it may sound and contrary to economic history (no other science has as wide a gulf between its historians and its theorists), virtually everyone is treating worktime as a constant or at least as a totally negligible variable. Time is a pervasive dimension. It's too glaringly present. And most of us want it to stay part of the woodwork. This is a big mistake for economists and fatal for economic designers.

Thus it is not coincidental that our economic design is contrarian, and countercyclical in two ways -

1. We 'timesizers' don't buy the happytalk of this part of the cycle. Not only are we not as euphoric in the current "highs" but we will not be as depressed in the coming "lows," the eventual obvious depression induced by the ongoing uncontrolled concentration (and nonspending) of spending power. See our 1920s page for an example of how intense the happytalk got the previous time round.

2. We don't even buy the cycle. We're not in a 'business cycle'; we're in an ongoing and deepening downward spiral. It's not cyclical; it's secular. The only reasons we have the illusion it's a cycle are (1) that factors outside the economy and outside economics such as wars and plagues enter the picture and provide upswings in the downward spiral, and (2) that wealthy decision-makers who are doing fine with the status quo assume everyone is doing fine and go to considerable expense in the media (which they own) to propagate that assumption - for example, they exaggerate every little uptick in the downward spiral and ignore ("externalize") every huge downdraft. It's as if we were playing Snakes and Ladders with telescopes, and looking at the ladders only through the magnifying end while looking at the snakes only through the miniaturizing end.