Articles: Economics for a Round Earth – the book
Coping with Aging Populations
An answer must be found to the problems of aging populations in more perfluent countries.
It has been suggested that efforts should be made to achieve and sustain a higher birthrate in the more perfluent countries, to lower the median age and create more taxable workers and more throughput to support ever rising pension demands. … Read more
Digression: Flat Earth Economics; Capitalist and Communist Varieties Contrasted
Communist systems could not be maintained without coercion and authoritarianism, which tended to exclude the great majority of the people from participation in administration and policymaking.
Communication with the governed was restricted because suggestions for change or adjustment of policy were regarded by the government as criticism and therefore as a potential threat; and by the governed as an act of daring best not undertaken. … Read more
The Throughput Chain
The throughput chain comprises several “links”, different processes that follow one another but do not all necessarily take place at the same rate. The processes commonly are: the extraction or controlling of wealth; its rendering or structuring into saleable goods and services; the sale of those goods and services; and their subsequent degradation into waste matter from which wealth may be renewed. … Read more
A Better Wage-fixing System
A preliminary point is that wage fixing must be taken away from the arena of conflict among stronger and weaker unions, stronger and weaker companies, and political ideology and vote-catching. High unemployment is such a serious social blight (as Keynes knew, but too many people seem not to recognise) that wage fixing should not be left to the vagaries of human nature but must be the sole province of an independent objective authority assisted by the best information technology and given legal power to obtain any and all statistics relevant to its work. … Read more
Digression: Government Expenditure – Government Employees
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”. … Read more
Demographic Trends and Living Standards
People are agents of throughput and the younger, healthier and less resistant to change are the people (for a given population, state of technology, and resource availability), then the larger and better quality the throughput they can achieve.
In more perfluent countries, in recent years, several factors have combined to effect a steady increase in the average age of the population. … Read more
The Effect of People’s Expectations
The factor of people’s expectations, left out of this discussion so far, would change the outcome somewhat.
The effect of rising expectations would be to stop the “boom” and return to “stagflationary” conditions sooner than if resource depletion alone were the depressing factor. … Read more
Money Supply, Throughput and Inflation
Material living standards are a function of three main variables – net throughput (Tn), population, and the prevailing distribution (D) of Tn among different social and occupational groups.
Tn is a function of available wealth, the state of technology, wealth renewal rates, human values, D and the proportionate flow of money through different economic channels. … Read more
Review of 1988 edition of Economics for a Round Earth
” . . a most useful work in enhancing my comprehension of the interaction between the discourses of economics and environmental conservation.” Continue reading
Other “Job Creation” Schemes
The statements in this post apply particularly to the economic predicament of the 1970′s and 80′s, which may recur under the pressure of modern problems. They do not necessarily hold true for every form of economic malaise; for instance, they would have been inaccurate for the Great Depression of the 1930′s. … Read more