File: c:/ddc/Angel/BestIntentions/Finale.html
Date:  Mon Oct 29 22:55:03 2007
       Wed Aug 14 20:48:16 2019
(C) OntoOO/ Dennis de Champeaux

Finale

The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders.
(Anonymous)

Talk is cheap. Let's buy some silence.
(Anonymous)

Tangled threads

Distinguishing additional distinct threats for the 21st century (that can reinforce each other) is helpful for how to deal with them.

The chapter on the detoriation of the income distribution described the old, recurring phenomenon of a growing segment being poor and a shrinking segment having more income and wealth. Taxation has been the traditional way to supplement market incomes and to reduce wealth. But taxation does not address the root cause: a growing segment having shrinking marketable skills. Durant reports the typical outcome: a collapse because bureacracies become corrupt or extortive.

A candidate novel threat, also suggested in the income distribution chapter, are societies where a majority does not participate in the economy anymore and relies on system charity, because we postulate that this situation is not stable.

The consequences of environmental, physical resource limitations are the topics of Diamond, Meadows et al and Randers. This threat is only novel because this time around the world's economies are intertwined and thus a collapse is likely global.

These threats can trigger each other, where which one is the first is anyones guess. With a heavy heart we proceed.

Last Call

We will describe more fixes in this last chapter. This is a challenge because the previous sections and chapters identify monumental local and global problems. Quick enduring fixes, we have not available. Feel good fixes to please the public, we leave to the spin-doctors.

Welfare states are burdened by excessive obligations to support large majorities. Awareness of civil rights dwarfs dedication to civil obligations. (Googling "civil rights" and "civil obligations" yields the results ratio of 785.) Primary economic activities shrink percentage wise, while the service sector increases. Keeping the size of the public sector down remains an ongoing battle. Healthcare in the US at 18% of GDP is an exceptional worrisome drain on its economy.

Nations are participating in supranational organizations. However, these organizations are weak because surrendering sovereignty is for now out of the question. Nations having to deal with too many internal problems limits commitments to addressing global topics.

Inside welfare states

A previous chapter discussed in more detail the three big problems (and smaller ones) that democracies fail to address. These problems are actually threats to the world community and thereby are challenges also for non-democracies.

There is no shortage of adherents of democracies that beat the drums regarding its superiority against the competition; see for example [Economist]. All the standard advantages are rehashed. However, they ignore the inability of democracies to deal with irrational population increases, economies that rely on plundering the planet and the disappearance of middle classes that are replaced by majorities that depend on government assistance programs.

China's ability to impose a 1-child rule to battle out of control population increases is a key example where democracies have failed: the inability to restrict a right deemed to be fundamental. The reigning banner motto of liberal democracies is 'civil rights', while 'civil obligations' - the equivalent of 'noblesse oblige' as a necessary complement - is absent.

China's unique 1-child mandate places the democracies in an ideological catch-up mode. The West claims that its economies are superior because they foster innovation. The West still has an economic advantage but its lead is shrinking rapidly. Sure, the defense can be that China is doing only me-too activities that do not depend on innovation. However, the West is now handicapped by carrying the weight of non-self reliant majorities.

If the (Western) democracies want to live up to their claim to superiority they better upgrade their constitutions, instead of creating a next tax to support a 'redundant' population.

Upgrades

We simply revisit the big challenges discussed and suggest what to do about them.

The population explosion

The notion that population increases are happening 'somewhere else but not here' is fallacious. Even countries where the native population's fertility rate is below 2.1 are still growing due to unstoppable immigration (and the greying of the population). Moreover, over-population effects everyone due to globalization. Population size is the primary parameter of the size of economies and since these are all unsustainable, population control is an excellent first step to shrink the out of control economies.

Remains the 'detail' how to constrain a population as China did in 1979 without using China's dictatorial power. An example of the following steps could make a population restriction at least explainable:
- The world's carrying capacity for life (human and all other species) is finite
- Humanity needs to leave room for other species, which reduces what is available for humanity
- Meadows et al [Meadows] claims that 4B is the natural carrying capacity of the world to feed its population without using unsustainable resources
- Hence (given the Tragedy of the Commons), all nations must reduce their population, say, by 40%.

Passing this (or similar) mandate through the membrane of a nation's sovereignty - especially when some nations refuse to participate - is certainly challenging. The next step is even harder. Positioning such a mandate so that the population of a democracy accepts the restriction voluntarily is where a democracy can demonstrate its claimed superiority.

Decline of the 'quality' of citizens

The problem can be stated in a few words: entitlements have the side effect of supporting procreation at the expense of the society. This has been used more by the bottom 50% of the society than by the top 50%. After several generations the result manifests itself, among others, in a population that needs massive economic assistance.

This topic has more visible variants. Globalization allows large companies to replace employees in the West by the creation of subsidiary companies in low-cost countries. In addition, there is the 'traditional' destruction of jobs due to Information Technology, the most recent incarnation of the Industrial Revolution. These two forces also increase the segment of the population that depend on economic assistance and/or the financial transfer volume into that segment.

The decline is still ongoing. Here trends of the fractions of the national income of the bottom 50% for two different nations, the US and The Netherlands. The contributions to the income taxes are shown as well.

Country Year Percent of all income Percent of all tax paid
US
199614%4.6%
200712%3%
The Netherlands
199925%8%
200523%5%

The bottom 50% in both societies remains slipping in their share of the nation's income and their contribution to the nation's tax revenues. (See also the 1983-2003 data for the US bottom 60% regarding the trend of share of net worth and share of income in the appendix "Data regarding the bottom of the US society" in the Economy chapter.)

A solution consists 'simply' of explaining to the citizens that "survival of the fittest" needs to be restored and that procreation requires a license that will be provided when applicants pass a few simple tests.

This solution may need alternatives to prevent an uprising. We leave the details as a wake-up call to our politicians who have always ignored this problem.

Taxability limit

Assume that a California type referendum is possible at the national level. Consider the proposition to create a special, once only tax on Bill Gates's net worth, which must be distributed to the population (yielding $167 for each citizen). Why not?

Creating taxes left and right to avoid dealing with root causes (declining economic self-sufficiency of the population) needs to be blocked. Allocating tax monies without accountability (public education and healthcare) needs to be curbed.

Consider the following limiting requirement for a tax: it should apply to 2/3 of those who propose the tax. This would invalidate immediately the Bill-Gates-assessment. It would have blocked in retrospect also corporate income taxes, lodging taxes, cigarette taxes, gambling taxes, pet taxes, soda drink taxes, amusement taxes, etc.

Democracies have been designed with checks and balances to prevent things to get out of control. There is, however, no counter force against taxability. Private sector companies go bankrupt if their expenditures are getting too high. Nations need a taxation limit principle to prevent them to raise taxes desperately. This will force them to scale back the monopolistic financial transfer flows and deal with root causes: now, growing economic dysfunctional population segments.

When do we agree that this insanity must stop?

Voting for what?

Voting for people often deteriorates in excessive focusing on personalities and who did what when and why or why not. This distracts from forcing political parties to articulate what they see as the problems confronting humanity and how they propose dealing with these problems. We can even envision a democracy where voting for people is replaced by given mandates to parties. It would be up to an empowered party (or a coalition of parties) to select for the executive branch a 'CEO' to execute a particular program. At all time a party's 'board of directors' could fire such a leader if pre-agreed milestones are not met. Such a democracy would be another step beyond the calls for a 'strong leader' as we see in dictatorships. It would force the electorate to think way harder about the challenges ahead and there would be more ownership of failures. A mandated party would similarly appoint from properly vetted members representatives for the legislative branch.

The chaos in Pakistan after the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto is a sad argument in favor of what we advocate here. Oppositions would not be able to impact the political process by assassinations; they would have to come up with more convincing philosophies, ideas, descriptions of the status quo and proposals how to make changes. Instead, her assassination caused international concerns because of the worry that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal would fall in the wrong hands.

The press would play a more prominent role with this fix. Instead of investigating whether a candidate inhaled, paid taxes for a nanny, or speculate excessively on private life aspects, they would describe and critique the standpoints and views of the different parties - even play an active role by elucidating topics avoided by everyone.

A legal framework

A nation's legal framework is inward looking: it regulates the relationships between citizens, other legal entities and the state. The quality of citizens topic falls within this scope. We may have to articulate a principle along the lines of:
The society needs to maintain large majorities of individuals/ families who are economic self-sufficient.
Such a principle may still require a legal innovation how to enforce it.

Constraining Industry

The main parameter that is causing non-sustainability of our economies is the size of their populations, which need to be reduced as discussed above. The secondary parameter is the consumption level per capita. Industry provides the consumables by plundering the planet's resources and ravaging it through their waste streams.

Advocating companies to be 'responsible' does not work. A company cannot incur expenses to reduce its ecological footprint if the competition does not. Hence it is again the governments - by catering for the here-and-now desires of their consumers - that they fail to safeguard the interests of future generations.

Things are actually way worse. Governments depend on the status quo that generate the taxable revenue streams to support the majorities that depend now for their survival on an extensive set of entitlements.

Breaking this catch-twenty-two without descending into chaos first is the miracle we are waiting for.

The Global Challenge

Long-term continuation of a society is typically taken for granted. Jared Diamond's Collapse text [Diamond] shows exhaustively that such a belief is very unwarranted given what has perspired during the preceding 40,000 years. A society collapsing and vanishing was in the past a local affair. Things are different now due to globalization, international trade, international interconnections, etc. Nations converge slowly to the same strengths, weaknesses and have the same crucial dependency: cheap, clean energy.

Energy companies feeling the squeeze have suddenly agreed that alternative energy, green energy, etc. is part of the future mix. They can even assert in advertisements that there is more than enough for the coming 100 years. How they pull the 100 years out of the hat in the context of still exponential population increases is a mystery. More important is that they reveal a fatal, implicit stance that humanity has about the planet's resources: these can be accessed and consumed, because future generations must fend for themselves. Sure, humanity in the past deforested, hunted species into extinction, scraped away easy reachable resources, and messed up the planet in too many other ways, but that is not a justification for us now doing the same, amplified with the most advanced tools provided by technology.

Individuals are often labeled as self-centered, egotists - part of the ME generation. This pales in comparison by humanity claiming now ownership of resources accumulated during the last billion years. And for what purposes - may we ask? To support a population that exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet? And why do we need to do that?

In short, we need a worldwide mandate for sustainable economies. Not the marketing version, but the one where humanity has a zero foot print on the planet. Further foot dragging is criminal - the galactic version.

A legal framework

Sustainability of a nation's economy is entangled with how humanity deals with the planet's resources. Thus we need something at the level of the United Nations:
The economies of member nations need to be indefinitely sustainable.
Enforcement of this principle may require a legal innovation as well.

We can safely ignore here the question how to muster the political will to establish these principles. Early commentary suggests that only a next global calamity will get things moving.

Another spin/ a last ditch attempt

The fixes described are at the level of humanity, the world system, nations and the (world) culture. They entail encrochements on individual's rights. How do we justify and sell these encrochements for the Common Good? Can we invoke the UN? Consider the 1945 Preamble of the UN:

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED

* to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
* to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
* to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
* to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS

* to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and
* to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and
* to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and
* to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,

HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS

Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.

These are great aims, but are they adequate to deal with humanity's challenges (and for life in general), for this century and further out?

Individuals and organizations have goals at many levels of time-scale. Circular time - in which there are no big changes - is sufficient for most individuals and for small organizations. The UN Preamble lists as goals:

-- to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom
-- economic and social advancement of all peoples
These are certainly worthwhile goals from the perspective of individuals, although they ignore the costs dimension to pursue them.

But what has the UN Preamble to offer about the goals that go beyond individual strivings? Can anything be proposed about humanity? About life in general on this planet? In terms of non-circular time?

We do not perceive anything of significance in the UN Preamble that we can latch on to. This hampers the recognition of the macro challenges we have identified in this text. Hence the proposed dealings of their fixes are out of the UN's scope. Can the UN be alerted to broaden their charter?

Solving a larger problem instead?

There are examples where nations engage in goals that can be labeled as transcendental (beyond ensuring their immediate survival). Pure science and research are funded for which applicable results are not required (in the short term). Space exploration, and cosmology are both endeavors that satisfy more our pervasive curiosity than the bottom line of the yearly budgets.

The lack of accepted (non-trivial) transcendental goals for life on the planet is a core reason why acceptance, by the UN, by nations as well as by individuals of our fixes is very hard. Here an example of a candidate goal.

It took several billions of years before a preliminary version of consciousness to emerge in a cantankerous species. We propose as humanity's main mission to spread it in the Universe. This likely requires major genetic engineering to create a space-hardened version of humanity, or even a silicon-carbon hybrid. Cutting to size humanity's ego is step one.

Due to limited resources we have a narrow window to get into the Universe. If we fail, humanity will likely be wiped out and it will take many millions of years before another variant of life on Earth, if any, if ever, will have another chance, [Gott].

Consciousness is not a mandatory consequence of evolution. Humanity shares the planet with millions of other species - as successful as we are - without it. So ...

This specific transcendental goal is certainly an 'acquired taste', lacking immediate appeal. We leave it to others to pursue ones among which humanity can rally first and thereby surrender acquired rights.

Who gets the ball rolling?

References

[Diamond] Diamond, J., Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, New York: Viking Books, ISBN 1-58663-863-7, 2005.

[Economist] Democracy's decline/ Crying for freedom, The Economist, pp 58-60, vol 395, no 8665, 2010 January.

[Gott] Gott, J.R., Time Travel in Einstein's Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time, Weidenfeld London, 2001.

[Meadows] Meadows, D., J. Randers, & D. Meadows, Limits to Growth, The 30-Year Update, Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 2004.

Appendix

We still need to fix a loose end. The Economy chapter has a quote from an anonymous author X:
For instance, it may be that machines will take over most of the work that is of real, practical importance, but that human beings will be kept busy by being given relatively unimportant work. ... Thus people would spend their time shining each other shoes, driving each other around in taxicabs, making handicrafts for one another, waiting on each other's tables, etc.
In another scenario, the machines take over from humanity and all bets are off when that would happen. Yet another author, Vernor Vinge, has already suggested, way earlier, that humanity is the midwife of another machine species and will subsequently step aside or wither away. Material from the anonymous author X have been used by Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near to illustrate what will happen when the machines take over, and by Bill Joy in Why the Future Doesn't Need Us to illustrate the potential danger of slowly creeping advances in technology on which humanity relies more and more.

All these scenarios depend on two assumptions:
- Moore's law, claiming that computer processors double their speed every two years, and
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) making rapid progress
Both of these do not hold. Moore's law stopped around 2004. There are no 16Ghz processors available. We do have machines with multiple processors, but AI does not have parallel algorithms and cognitive operations require typically exponential resources.

Thus the Kurzweil singularity scenario and the ones by author X are, for now, a distant fantasy. By the way, author X is Ted Kaczynski, alias the Unabomber; a runaway mind who killed 3 people, maimed too many others and proposed a bizarre, unreal solution to his scenarios: surrendering technology.

The 'good' news is that most Meadows scenario [Meadows] 'predict' a world wide collapse around 2030-2040 due to resource exhaustion, which would push the Singularity moment way, way out ...

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