Economics for a Round Earth - the book

It has not been the aim of these posts to provide detailed remedies for every current problem in or related to economics.

It has only been my purpose to outline a more practical and realistic relationship between the human economy and the world we live in, one which favours life over death, progress and enhancement over degeneration.

If the ideas in these posts be sound, then others can develop and build upon them in the future to quicken our step towards a sustainable, peaceful human world.

Huge sums are spent by governments on weapons and troops, particularly in certain countries. There are two remedies for this drain on government expenditure, one long-term and one short-term.

The long-term answer lies in the evolution of the world community towards political and economic unity - that is unity in the cooperative rather than in the monolithic sense. As this evolution proceeds, the need for large armed forces with massive sophisticated weapons systems will diminish, along with the need for expenditure on them.

Any employee of government would be familiar with the problems peculiar to their area - the “walking dead”, the top-heavy hierarchy, the frequent and prolonged breaks. But it is a mistake to state sweepingly that “all civil servants are slackers”. What usually happens is that a fraction of the employees do most of the work and could hold their own in the most competitive private company. A further substantial proportion do little work and are carried by their workmates. The remainder are various degrees of bosses and do little besides talk to each other, create paper, and frustrate their subordinates.

Measures to reduce expenditure and increase revenue raising by governments will often be seen in current economic terms as “costs” to the nation. But if seen in the light of the ideas put forward in the post about “Costs - What Really Costs Us and What Doesn’t?” they are economic gains.

A major problem for economies around the world is government debt. This matter has been mentioned in other posts. Many governments have been running a deficit on their annual budget for years. It is not universally realised that these deficits are cumulative. A smaller deficit in the current year than in the last does not mean that government debt has fallen. Every year in which there is a deficit of any size adds to the overall government debt. At one time, merely paying interest on the accumulated government debt was the third largest item in the annual budget of the U.S.A, after social security and defence, and the second largest item on Sweden’s budget after social security. These payments merely take care of interest and do not reduce the principal.