Production?
Structuring, or realising, wealth into goods and services is currently called production or output, as though wealth were being created. In fact, this structuring or realisation is part of the process of throughput of wealth.
The use of goods and services, now called consumption in the sense of being opposite to “production”, is really a subsequent process in the throughput chain whereby wealth is degraded into waste matter and heat whence it may be renewed. … Read more
Stopping Global Warming – Better Communication Needed
In Australia the federal government is trying to implement an Emissions Trading Scheme to combat global warming. Opponents of this scheme argue that it will cost jobs.
Surely the whole point of trying to slow and stop global warming is that if such warming continues unchecked, it will cost millions of jobs, and lives, worldwide, because of the destructive effects of changing climates and rising sea levels. … Read more
The Idea of Proportionate Flows Applied to Wages – the Stagflation of the 1970′s and 80′s
Misnamed “Keynesian” deficit financing policies applied in more recent years to “recessions” have contributed more and more to inflation and less and less to alleviating unemployment.
These policies have come to exacerbate the very disease, unemployment, they were meant to remedy. … Read more
The Solar-Powered Car
In a feat of enterprise and endurance, Hans Tholstrup drove a solar-powered car across Australia in 1979. The car had a large flat roof arrayed with photoelectric cells that turned the sun’s radiation into electricity and charged a battery.
Solar radiation cannot deliver more than about a kilowatt, roughly an old-fashioned horsepower, per square metre at ground level, and it usually delivers less. … Read more
The Idea of Proportionate Flows Applied to Wages: the Great Depression
The Great Depression of the 1930′s has been very thoroughly gone over in the literature and there would be no need to mention it here except that it is necessary to describe it in terms of the concepts presented in these posts and to link it with the present day. … Read more
Employment and the Steady State
It is necessary here to repeat a point made or implied earlier, that the level and rate of change of economic activity and the level of unemployment are to a large extent independent of one another. Not totally independent of course, each is one determinant of the other. … Read more
The Optimum Proportionate Flow Condition
To repeat in another way a point discussed earlier, there is an achievable optimum flow of money through the aggregate income (wages plus social welfare) channel in relation to the flow through other channels. The optimum state is characterised in two ways: (i) full employment, that is no involuntary employment of able people, prevails; (ii) economic activity, the wealth throughput rate, is at the maximum possible within the constraints imposed by other factors. … Read more
Deficit Financing
The plan which eventually became acceptable, more readily under pressure of the Second World War, was that of deficit spending, whereby the government deliberately set out to spend more than they received through taxes, duties, and charges. The gap could be filled by borrowing, thereby mobilising stagnant funds. … Read more
Digression: the Private Motor Car – a Basic Necessity?
The transport policy referred to in the previous post, where everyone is expected to undertake all journeys in their own big car, has become so entrenched in many countries over the last fifty years that it seems impossible to change or modify. … Read more
If you can’t teach them, beat them.
It is suggested that a society that brings up its children as described here, is not a life-loving society that nurtures its children. It is a cannibalistic society that devours its children. Continue reading