Can we humans be literally 100 times happier, with one new idea, with one law?

Can we humans be literally 100 times happier, with one new idea, one new law?
Consider the following, and decide.
There must have been a time when we got the idea of fire, of using and handling fire. And it made us much happier. So it seems that new ideas can come along, and make us all happier.
Can there be something small and unnoticeable in human culture, in human thought, that has a small effect, but which slowly imperceptibly grows, accumulates, and slowly, imperceptibly makes human life worse, so that after a long time human life is much worse than it need be, but the decline has been so slow that no one is aware of it? If human happiness declined 1% every 30 years, it would be hard to detect it, amidst all the variety of individual happiness levels, and yet after 3000 years, 100% would be gone.
I think that something like this has indeed happened, and that therefore we have the greatest opportunity for increase of happiness in the history of the world, and the cause is small, and easily removed. A bit like a dripping pipe, which floods the house while you are away, and which is quickly fixed when you return. The greatest problems in the world can be solved with the finding of the root cause, which can be as small as a dripping pipe. The greatness of the problems may be only a reflection of the length of time the root cause has gone undetected, and so the greatness of the problems does not mean that they can only be solved with enormous effort. We have been reduced to continually mopping up the house, because we could never find the dripping pipe.
I think I have found the dripping pipe.
At some point, we began to trade, and to specialise in the work we did, because we could trade the products of our work for the variety of things we needed. The two things in every transaction, buy, sell and barter, cannot be equal in the amount of work gone into them. The two things must be worth x and x+y, so that every transaction must be a fair-exchange-no-robbery [the x's] plus a 'robbery', the y. One person has done x amount of work and gets x+y work, and the other does x+y work and gets x work. The difference, the y, is too small to see in one transaction. But the cumulative effect will become obvious in time. Over time, the little gains and losses will not always even out. A few, just by luck, will make far more gains than losses. And a few will, just by luck, make far more losses than gains. And many will make smaller net gains or losses. As long as transaction goes on, the spread of net gains and losses will always grow. It will be impossible to point to a cause, because it is impossible to measure such small amounts in each transaction. But the ever-growing inequality will generate resentment. People will not know how it has happened, but they will know it has happened. And there will be conflict, antagonism between the lucky and the unlucky. And that will cause rows, and the injuries in the rows will be revenged with bigger injuries, and the inequality will go on growing.
We all know the saying the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And we all know this means that the rich get more and more per unit of work they do, and the poor get less and less per unit of work they do. And the violence is proportional to the inequality. And social unhappiness is proportional to the violence. What started out as trade between equals, with specialisation of work, and exchange of products of work, with perfect amity and trust and friendship, becomes increasingly acrimonious and unfriendly. The beneficiaries of a lot of y's will honestly believe they have not stolen, and it will be true that they have not stolen. Transaction itself has been stealing. Some of the beneficiaries may take pity on the losers, some of the beneficiaries will look for other explanations for the difference in wealth. The government of communities will tend to be with those who are better off, as they will have more leisure and more social esteem. Many will assume that the better-off have somehow got superior qualities, and will promote and support them in governing positions. If work could be measured, it could be decided how much each should have, and perhaps people would have then looked to see what caused the overpay and underpay. But there is no measurement of work. So no one can aim to justice, to equal pay for equal work. Sometimes people will feel that this can't go on, and will redistribute wealth more equally, by legislation or by revolution, sure that extreme inequality cannot be right. But the constant pressure of no one knowing exactly where justice lies, and the constant pressure of the overpaid's will to hold on to what they have got hold of, will continue to support inequality. And the passing of wealth from generation to generation by inheritance will permit inequality to evergrow.
Now we have pay for a year's work ranging from $30 to $30 billion, from 10,000th of average to 1000,000 times average, and still no one is sure this is wrong, and many are confident it is right. And violence is proportional to the injustice. If you set the most overpaid and the most underpaid to create wealth by work, to build a house, say, with equal tools and equal materials, and equal access to information, the range of creation of wealth would not be that different. And yet we allow one person to do a year's work, and then give them a license to take out of the pool of social wealth created by work the work contained in 30,000 $1 million homes, as if he had worked as hard as someone building 30,000 $1 million homes in one year, which is 82 $1 million homes every day.
Violence [war, crime, brutality and weaponry] has grown for 3000 years, and is now at the level of world wars, genocide and 60 times PDC [planet death capability]. All grown from the first amicable transaction with its tiny y, multiplied by trillions of transactions.
We could have decided that no one can work more than twice as hard as the average, and so no one shall have more than twice the average income. But for various reasons, we never did. There is a natural range of belligerence and gentleness, arrogance and modesty, in human nature. And money is a power, the second greatest power in the world. And so, generally, it has been the most belligerent, the most arrogant who have sought and most tightly held on to all the wealth accumulation there was, although it brought them endless trouble in the form of other people wanting, justly and unjustly, a piece of the action. And it has been the more modest, the more instinctively just, the less belligerent who have let them. And the most belligerent have been natural choices as protectors, although the belligerence has not always been directed outwards from the community, and although the belligerent have got the little people into many more battles than they needed to fight. Some people have pointed out that a community is weaker if most of its people are reduced to extreme poverty, but their voices have not moved the belligerent. The more the belligerent have got, the more they have been under attack from within and from without. And so they have been driven by necessity to get more. Which has made them under greater attack, which has demanded more theft at home and abroad. So inequality is its own fertiliser, and equality has rarely made an appearance, and only to be eroded by transaction and greed.
People know that money or wealth is good, is a power. And they have assumed that more money is always better, and more power. The more insecure the ever-rising violence has made them feel, the more people have turned to money to protect them. And this has driven inequality faster. And violence. Actually, money is not always good, there is a point where it stops being good and starts being bad, and gets worse. Money is good when it is self-earned, and bad when it is other-earned. The pool of social wealth, the sum of the products of work, is finite, not infinite. The pool of social wealth is made up of nature's bounty and human work, both finite, not infinite. The pool has grown fast with industry and computers, but it is still always finite. The potential may be infinite, but the actuality is finite. And this means that, if everyone tries to get unllimited fortunes out of it, that there will be overpay and underpay. We all go out into the economic world and try to get as much as we can, and never feel, generally, that we can have too much. We laud the 'success' stories, of those who got a lot out. It tends to convince us that there is hope for us too, although, with a finite pool of wealth, the more overpaid some are, the more underpaid others are. And the violence and unfriendliness is proportional to the overpay and underpay. The greater the overpay and underpay, the more people are motivated to get just more, and the less they are motivated to get out as much as they put in by their work. The more you get for the less work done, the greater the 'success' is felt to be, although this means that others have to get less per unit of work they do, and the more violence there is. Pay for no work means work for no pay, because the pool of social wealth is filled by work and nature's bounty, and no one has natural right to a greater share of nature's bounty than any other. Individual contribution by work to the social pool of wealth is limited, and so unlimited pay is unjust overpay, and thus causes violence. So more money is not always better. There is a point where it gets into overpay, causing underpay, causing violence, which ever-grows, as both sides try to prevail. The attacks on overpay are proportional to the size of the overpay. And the attacks are ceaseless, while the overfortune is finite, so every overfortune must fall in finite time, and must be preserved only with ceaseless labour of defense. The self-protective power of money is proportional to the quantity of money, but the attacks on overpay are proportional to the size of the overpay, and cease only with the existence of the overfortune. Add the fact that satisfaction from money is limited to the desires and appetites of the body, so that overpay cannot add more satisfaction, since fairpay satisfies all bodily desires, and we can see that overpay has no upside and an enormous proportionate downside. The underpaid see overpay satisfying their unsatisfied desires, and so glamourise and love overpay, but fairpay more than satisfies all desires. Overpay only adds troubles, the ceaseless draining tension between overpaid and underpaid. The sense of equality drives the underpaid to aim to have as much overpay as anyone has, and this keeps inequality growing. Studies have shown that the added happiness effect of more money stops at about $50,000 a year per family, whereas fairpay per family is around $200,000. We could all do one quarter the work, and have no less satisfaction.
So equality, pay justice, is the most undervalued stock, able to pay enormous dividends in happiness. Much more satisfaction for the underpaid, no less satisfaction for the overpaid, and the removal of the enormous burden of 3000 years growth of violence and unfriendliness from everyone. If one person steals the good of 1000, that one is unhappier, with merely 1000 times more goods than he can consume, and 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends. And of course the 1000 are unhappier. It is that simple.
How do we get from here to there? Education. 100% of people being convinced of the above simple truth will have an enormous effect on policies. When 100% of people had gone through the learning curve about the use and handling of fire, there was not much more to be done, except gather sticks. At the moment, everyone is more or less convinced that more money is always better, and everyone is sure that it is very difficult to change people's minds. Only changing our own minds will convince us that others' minds can be changed. Know that, if it takes a month to convince yourself, after looking at the facts every which way, and to pass it on to two people for them to check out, it will take only 31 months for every adult in the world to know it, just by word of mouth. There are 3 billion adults to reach, but there are 3 billion adults to reach them, with all their powers.
Can we be literally 100 times happier? Consider that, if a government committed the super-extreme pay injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of citizens, and giving it to 1%, there would be the loss of 81% of national happiness just in the loss of the 90% to the 90%, and, on top of that, there would be the enormous and ever-escalating violence, the destruction and waste of property and lives, the waste of productivity and time in the many people tied up in the violence. I think this might well bring the loss of happiness up to 99%. And we have far worse inequality in the real world, with overpay up to 100,000 times average, and underpay down to 10,000th of average. In the above super-extreme example, the 1% overpaid are overpaid only 82 times average, and the underpaid are underpaid only 10th. So I think we can, very conservatively, be literally 100 times happier. It is the slow, imperceptible decline of happiness with the rise of inequality and violence over 3000 years that has given us this greatest opportunity for increase of happiness. We have been saving happiness for that long.
As for the practicalities, it is only necessary to make everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates, and the accumulation of 3000 years of growing overpay will shower down gently on humanity over two generations. Or, even simpler, we can increase the money supply 1% a month and pay it equally into everyone's accounts. The inflation effect will steadily reduce the overpays and the payments will reduce the underpays. Inflation is not bad when the new money is going to everyone.
Are we living on the edge of a precipice and slowly being bulldozed off the edge? It doesn't look like it, if you look around town. But we have 5 billion people on between 100th and 10,000th of average pay per year. How angry would you be to be on 1000th of fairpay? Multiply by 5 billion and that is how much anger that is loose in the world. We have the super-overpaid killing a million children in Iraq. We have population growing to 100 billion in this century. We have topsoil being lost at the rate of 1% a year, which is 100% in this century. This means we will have in this century vast hordes of billions fighting over the shrinking scraps of remaining arable land. We have suicide bombers, people so desperate, so angry at injustice, that they are prepared to do that. We have increased our power to destroy ourselves by a factor of 60,000 in the last 50 years, thanks to e=mc2, from 100,000 in one day to 6,000,000,000, by nuclear winter, an artificial triple ice-age, by blocking out the sun with smoke, and irradiating the planet for a million years. We have, with transport technology, concentrated the violence, like pressurising a gas, by a factor of 250 in the last 200 years, from one day away being 50 miles to being 12,500 miles. Global means every locality.
With equality, progress would be 100 times faster. With the super-extreme inequality we have, 90% of the scientists and thinkers we have are tied up in the consequences of inequality, in business, the military-industrial complex, the legal system, universities and governments, and 90% of the scientists we could have are too poor to become scientists. With 3000 years of equality, we would have been among the stars. History is unanimous: equality is strong, inequality is weak. The world is a ticking bomb. Do we want to live, will we stir ourselves to intelligent action, or are we all suicide bombers?
World annual income is US$300 trillion, and there are 3 billion workers, including housewives and students. US$100,000 per worker, including housewives and students. Family income, US$200,000. World annual income is derived from Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income, 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp237-258, compounded with global inflation since 1987.
If you approve of this document, or wish to give others the opportunity to consider it while you are considering it, download it from happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com and send it to all government and other social and moral leaders, and to everyone you can. Blitz the world with realism. It can be called democratic capitalism, justice economics or survival.