Phil "Mr. Timesizing®" Hyde

For Visionaries
© 2007 Philip Hyde, 66 rue de Carillon, Gatineau-secteur-Hull J8X 2P2 Québec

        U.S. Democrats & Canada’s Liberals need a vision to reverse the huge backward motion of the last 6 years in countless dimensions. They need something to counter the "vision" of the 1920s that Republicans, misnamed "Conservatives" and neo-cons have dressed up to look new (no social jobs but plenty of defense jobs and military makework). Democrats, Liberals and neo-liberals have been using the New Deal of the 1930s over and over again (social makework and jobs in the arts but eventually, you guessed it, defense jobs and military makework). But there was a third way in the 1930s, a vision used briefly (1938-40) but dropped when the US entered World War II, a vision that would have worked in the long run without requiring repeated wars to bail it out with infinite demand and labor-surplus diversion and destruction (Germany I, Germany II, Japan, Korea, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq...). We call that third way Timesizing.
        This website offers our best effort at economic designing and our best-candidate economic design. The Timesizing design is a piece of social software that has designed-in, pre-cued upgrades to keep up with rising expectations. It offers an all-elucidating, all-orienting vision that today's divided, floundering progressives seem to be groping for.
        Timesizing is sharework instead of makework. Timesizing is a positive, growth-oriented response to technology instead of downsizing. Timesizing is cutting hours instead of cutting jobs, wage earners and markets. Timesizing is sharing the vanishing human work in the age of mechanization, automation, technology, cybernetics and now, robotization. Timesizing is spreading around the natural market-demanded work instead of straining to create enough artificial jobs to keep everyone busy for 40 hours a week, the frozen 1940 workweek that hasn't been adjusted in over two generations despite wave after wave of "work saving" technology. Timesizing is getting more of the most basic freedom out of technology, free time, instead of continuing to kid ourselves that work-saving technology "creates more jobs than it destroys."
        Timesizing is cutting hours in response to technology and keeping everyone working and shopping, instead of the downsizing response that puts more and more people out of work and cuts its own markets. Conventional economists talk growth but walk downsizing and offshoring. They've created the monster of massive production capacity and dwindling consumption capacity. They even fight inflation by raising interest rates and clobbering growth. Timesizing replaces their contorted contradictions with common sense. Mainstream economists, at least in the English-speaking world, are too arrogant, self-absorbed, short-sighted, and myopic. This website is not for them.
        Who is our target audience? This website is for optimists - idealists, reformers, high-techies (both Dilberts and Wallies), progressives, altruists, ecologists, peaceniks, and true conservatives - anyone who's become bored with the superficial progress of ever more technological whizbang and work-harder "efficiency," fed up with 100s more millionaires and 1000s more poverty cases, and frustrated with constantly "jumping on their white horse and riding off in all directions." To balance the optimists' frequent naivete, this site also responds to depressingly well-informed cynics, such as Chomsky. The optimists fill their books with shocked &/or outraged diagnoses and enthusiastic but vague, simplistic, unstrategic and mixed-level cures. The cynics offer cures only one step ahead, and only in response to pestering from their depressed audiences. In each case, it's 90% diagnosis and only 10% cure. This site, building on the optimists' and cynics' diagnoses, reverses those percentages.
        This site defines a stepping stone between principles and practice, a missing link between our lofty goals of justice and equity, and our compromised-to-the-point-of-irrelevance corporate strategy and government policy. It's for people who hunger for strategic priorities and thirst for real progress, instead of more and more technological fireworks and 'smarter' weapons masquerading as progress. It's for people who sense there's a natural order in which the bad old megaproblems must be addressed. And it's for people who, based on that order, sense there's a Master Problem whose solution would loosen the key log in the logjam of significant progress and would dissolve a maximum of resistance and unleash a maximum of advance. And this site identifies the minimum necessary solution at the core of our social software, and avoids the any-size-solution approach that morphs into a megasolution and results in a burgeoning maximum of stiflingly detailed regulations (ie: socialism).
          So this site is for people who realize it's much easier to get what you want if you know what it looks like, especially in dealing with today's power elite, who know exactly what they want because they want the past, apparently the Roaring Twenties or earlier. Unfortunately, today's progressives "have ideas, but no vision" (NYT op ed 11/05/04) - they don't know what they want or what it looks like. They don't know what minimum of institutions has to change, or what series of dimensions they have to change in, or what critical dimension has to change first, or by what minimum we have to change it, or how to make the change adjustable and not rigid, or how to make it automatic instead of deliberate and political, indeed homeostatic instead of arbitrary and controversial.
          This website fills in the missing progressive vision. It offers a vision spun to the right - the fashion of the times;  focused - instead of filled with favorite but irrelevant issues;  and minimalized - instead of over-reaching and micromanaging.

For more information, see our handbook Timesizing, Not Downsizing (140 pages) available for US$12, plus $3 shipping, from:   Phil Hyde, Timesizing.com, PO Box 622, Cambridge-B, Mass. 02140, USA.

Questions, comments, feedback?  Phone 617-623-8080 (Boston) or 819-771-8546 (Québec), or email us.

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