Mission impossible: rationality

Mission impossible: rationality, if you should decide to accept it

Human care, human industry.
Look at your town. So much is provided, so many needs are addressed and answered. People have food, housing, warmth. Even smaller needs are taken care of. Problems with teeth? Systems for taking care of teeth are set up. And not just pull a troublesome tooth. The most elaborate tools have been designed, built and distributed to answer problems of teeth. The need or desire for stories is answered with libraries, television, etc. Roads and footpaths for greater ease of moving around. For the removal of wastes, there are rubbish collections, and sewage pipes have been laid in every street. If you break a leg, hospitals are set up. If you get lost in the forests, systems are organised and ready to go to find you. Thousands of needs have been addressed and answered with enormous industry. All systems go. Care and tremendous energy has been shown in responding to needs and desires. Food is available, and not just food, but tremendous variety. Everywhere there is organisation, energy, industry, systems to provide and to meet needs and desires, being run every day to satisfy. Right down to places for skateboarding. Are humans lazy, unresponding? Do they just cater for the need for food and then leave everything else? No, no and no. Need to water your garden? Hoses are provided, underground pipes are laid to deliver water to your house. Need an easier way to connect your hose to the tap? Easier couplings are designed, built, distributed. The most incredible industry, responsiveness. Do mothers need support, education? Provided. A list of all the needs and desires responded to would be very, very long, would contain thousands or millions of items.

Strange custom of the Hoo-Min tribe.
Compare the strange customs of the Hoo-Min tribe, recently discovered. They have a culture in which, it is calculated, there is far more than enough for everybody. Everyone works hard. And yet, it is calculated, the person with most gets 100,000 times as much as the average, and the person with least gets 10,000th of average. In other words, the Hoo-Min tribe believes in, or practises, the most extremely uneven distribution. If you ask them why this one person has so much, they say it is because he is doing something very special, he is a very special person, and deserves to have so much. - Why do 90% of the tribe have less than 100th of average? - Because that is all they earn, that is all they are worth. - But everyone is working, more or less equally, you point out. - Oh yes, but the ones with little, they are not working productively. They don't have the marvellous abilities of the ones getting 100,000 times the average. You reply: I have watched the ones being paid 100,000 times average, and I don't see anything remarkable about their work behaviour. They seem to me to be working about the same as everybody. Their reply: Stranger, you are blind, look at how much they have. It is perfectly obvious that they are doing something remarkable, look at how much they have. Could they have so much if they were not remarkable? - I see from your history that these people with so much have often been, well, pushed off their position, by other people with as much, or nearly as much, and sometimes by those with little. - Oh yes, this is true, there are people who are bad and greedy, who want what the remarkable ones have without themselves being remarkable. - I see from your history that there have occasionally been mass uprisings against the ones with most, and those have been put to death. And the mass of people have called for a change in the system, so that there is not this extreme range of pay. - That is true, but such phases are brief, most of the time everybody understands the correctness of our system, and accepts it happily. - It can't be pleasant for the ones with much to be surrounded by so many people who have so little, who are ignorant and diseased. - Well, they put up with it. - So many people unable to be educated, unable to contribute in so many ways because they have so little, is it not a terrible waste of talent? And it seems to me that some having so much is like a golden carrot to everyone to get more, to get as much as they can, and also so many having so little is also a huge stimulus for people to get more in any way they can, and that consequently there is much crime and war, which would not happen if everyone was paid according to how much work they did. - But did I not tell you, stranger, that everyone is being paid according to how much work they do? Whatever people have, it is because of how much work they do. If everyone worked as hard as those who have much, they would have as much. Isn't it obvious? Those with much have so much because of their work. Anyone who does what they did would have as much. - But, friend, is it not possible there are other reasons why those with much have so much? Are you sure it is because of their work?

Equality: synaptic failure.
In a recent article, someone suggests that top executive pay should be no more than 30-40 times as much as the average worker. Is this because the exec works 30-40 times as many hours? Obviously not. The average worker works maybe 50 hours a week, and no one can work more than 100 hours a week, average, longterm. And there is no perception that execs are working such long hours. There is no measurement of working hours, but it is possible that execs are working no longer than average. Perhaps 20% longer hours, perhaps not. Is this because execs are working 30-40 times harder per hour? Are they shuffling paper 30-40 times faster than the average paper shuffler? Are they deciding, talking, reading, discussing, telephoning, 30-40 times faster? No, no one thinks that. Is it that they have rare gifts of management? There is no measurement of giftedness, or of rarity, but perhaps they have rare gifts. Is it sense, or justice, to pay for gifts? Mother nature has done the work, not the person. All the person has done is receive the gift, or, rather, not even that, the gift has been installed by mother nature too. There is not the slightest inclination in society to pay people for receiving birthday gifts or christmas gifts. Even if there was, it is hard to see how a dollar amount could be put on how much should be paid to people for having received gifts. Is it the rarity? Then we are paying the person because mother nature has failed to provide these gifts to many. Paying a person for an absence of gifts. Again, paying for no work by the person. Paying the person for work not done by mother nature. And this pay comes out of pay for people who have done work, because the pay for execs buys goods, which have been made by others' work. The higher pay to execs is a legal license to take from the social pool of goods made by work. A legal license to take out where they did not put in. Leaving less in the pool for those who put in. Is it pay for education? Education is work by the person, and should be paid for. And society should pay for education, not parents or scholarships or students, since it is society that benefits. [Society has the right to decide how much education it wants to buy.] And then no one would in sanity be paid for having been educated, for there is no work, no sacrifice of time or energy, in having studied. And no one would in sanity choose to pay for educatedness, for a person having the knowledge in their head. There is no effort keeping the knowledge in the head, keeping the diploma on the wall. Is it pay for 'responsibility', that is, for heading a large organisation? Is there any belief anywhere that responsibility is a drain on the energies, that responsibility requires extra pay to compensate for greater energy drain with responsibility? Do execs need 30-40 times more food to do their responsible jobs? [Even if they did, food is only a fraction of personal expenses.] It seems that the exec is just working, the same as anyone, but in a 'responsible' job. They are just using what they have, just like everyone. Sacrificing the same time and energies as anyone else. And there is no correlation between 'responsibility' and pay, no direct payment for 'responsibility', no mechanism of measurement of 'responsibility' and corresponding payment for responsibility. People with equal numbers 'under' them are not paid equal fees for 'responsibility'.
We have to look elsewhere for the explanation of this universal devotion to inequality, this avoidance of pay justice. People feel it is natural that people higher in hierarchies be paid more. Even though this extra pay comes out of their own pockets. Although, how much are people aware that overpay, pay for no work by the person paid, means underpay, work for no pay, for others? How much are 'workers' aware that they are paying for this overpay? People are generally aware of a connection between higher pay and lower pay. But they are not so conscious that they see it as taking goods off them and giving them to others. They do not, I think, see it so clearly as plain theft, as removal of things that are theirs by right of having done the work, and giving them to others who have not done the work that made them. In the complicatedness of economic society, the dots are not so well connected. People see others rich, and themselves unrich, and perhaps do not perceive that both are working equally hard, or much more equally hard than the 'rewards'. The sense of justice may stimulate them to get as rich, by hook or by crook, or by the same means, but there is no clear sense of simple plain theft, of pay injustice. Even the mental leap from pay injustice ['wealth disparity', inequality, 'socio-economic strata'] to theft is too great. There are too many imponderables in the way, like 'responsibility', rarity, gifts, 'hard work'. People hear: I made my money by hard work, and, if they don't exactly swallow it, they cannot spit it out. They don't reply: Do you mean that your pay per hour is the same as mine, and the difference in incomes is just that you have worked more hours? They think: Well, it is true I haven't run around, organising warehouses, advertising, office staff, etc. There is a lack of devotion to pay justice, to equal pay for equal work. This devotion is presumably eroded by unclarity, and by feeling that freedom for the other to be overpaid is freedom for self to be overpaid. Without the thought that opening the gates to limitless overpay is opening the gates to limitless underpay. Without the thought that freedom of overpay may mean a little overpay for some and a lot of overpay for others. Without the thought that what you gain by overpay may be more than eroded by others' overpay. Without the thought that opening the gates to overpay means galloping, ever-growing inequality and hence galloping ever-growing violence [war and crime]. For money is the joker good, good for all the millions of things money buys, so that theft of money is theft of just about everything, so theft of money is the greatest injury, stimulating the greatest anger. Underpay does not cause great resentment as long as underpay still meets most needs, but underpay grows with overpay, and it at some point bites more and more deeply into quality of life. Studies have shown that happiness does not increase above about $50,000 per family, so underpay above this is not very stimulating to resentment of the theft. But meanwhile, the overpay is overpower, because money is a power, the second greatest power, and rights, freedoms and pay are ever-increasingly eroded. People underestimate the importance of preventing overpay. They allow overpay as if overpay was innocent, harmless to them, whereas overpay is arrogance and tyranny. And ever-growing. And the less pay, the less power there is to remedy it. And the less safety there is in opposing it. So human society has lumbered on for about 3000 years, with ever-growing inequality, and revolutions, and war and crime. People, so careful about so many things, so industrious in serving their needs and desires, have not learned to be careful about this. What do I care if people are rich, if I am well enough? But money rakes money, and money is power. One billion pulls in $100 million every year at 10%, with no work at all. Great! people think. And they imagine the pleasure of that if it were them. Money for no work is good, they think. And they do not oppose it. They do not think that the money for no work comes from work for no money. They don't see themselves losing by others gaining. They don't remember that if water goes above its level, water has to go below its level, and that as far as water is above and below its level, the rougher it is for everyone. They do not think that a person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for a 1000 days at $1 a day, resulting in warmongering and cannonfoddering. If they are moderately underpaid, they are not worried. And those severely underpaid, and angry, and violent, well, that's life, people fight. You just do your best to protect yourself. Society seems good to them. The ratio of highest to lowest pay per hour is one billion. Annual income ranges from $30 to $30 billion. If equality was a swimming pool one metre deep [$100,000 a year per worker, including housewives and students], our pool is now 98% up in a thin needle going up 100,000 metres, 100 kilometres, and 90% of the pool is between 1cm and 10th of 1mm deep. Overpay and underpay is now $250 trillion a year. An inequality factor of one billion. A violence factor of one billion. A misery factor of one billion. A weaponry factor of one billion. A disinformation factor of one billion. A corruption factor of one billion. A brutality factor of one billion. [A million children killed in Iraq.] An inequality of opportunity factor of one billion. A mental disease factor of one billion. An ungovernance factor of one billion. [World topsoil is being lost at the rate of 1% a year, 100% a century.] A waste and destruction factor of one billion. A horrors and terrors factor of one billion. A potential for increase of happiness factor of one billion. Technological progress would be 100 times faster, for 90% of scientists, etc are tied up in the consequences of the violence, in business, in the legal system, the government, the universities, the military-industrial complex, the hospitals, and 90% of the scientists we could have are too poor to become scientists. Happiness has been eroding imperceptibly slowly for 3000 years, and we have got used to each new level, and have no way of remembering how happy we can be. [Inequality is impossible without trade, and without the imperishability of money. It is hard to accumulate wealth when you have only perishables. Trade grows inequality [endlessly], because the two things in a trade cannot be exactly equal in workvalue.]

Exit.
This super-super-extreme situation can be fixed easily, by making everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to earn that money, everyone has done everything to earn that money, to make the goods the money buys. Or [or and] by increasing the money supply 1% a month and giving it equally to everyone. Inflation is not bad if everyone is getting money to compensate. The inflation effect reduces overfortunes and the equal share reduces underpay. [Paying everyone, the 1% overpaid and the 99% underpaid, because it saves the enormous bureaucratic cost and labour of distinguishing the two.] Everyone would begin receiving like gentle rain the 98% of world earnings now up in the needle of overpay, increasing happiness for overpaid and underpaid. But there is no consciousness. If the water supply fails, people act, and act until it is fixed. But with super-super-extreme inequality, with its proportionate super-super-extreme violence, danger and disorder [relative to what we could have], there is no reaction, no will. Not even the appearance of nuclear winter on the horizon makes any motion in humanity. If serious people began talking seriously about it, and pointing the way out, people would begin to move, activity would begin. Who gains from inequality? If one person steals the property of 1000, that person is unhappier, with merely 1000 times more than he can use, and 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends. And the 1000 are unhappier. History is unanimous, equality is strong, inequality is weak, every heap of wealth, individual, national and imperial, has fallen. Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown. Money is the second greatest power, the underpaid are the greatest power. Injury energises. Every heap of wealth is finite, and the attacks on them, from underpaid and overpaid, end only with the heap of wealth. The underpaid have lost many battles, they have never lost the war. The third world are gaining in share of world wealth at the rate of 10% every 30 years, from 51% now. We practise every person for himself, and the devil take the hindmost. But the devil takes all. The rough sea is rough for all. Money gives protection, but the attacks are proportional to the size of the heap. Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them. So who gains from inequality? No one. So who gains from equality? Justice is a hugely undervalued stock, it is standing by to pay the highest dividends to all, waiting for our attention, our waking. We have the greatest opportunity for increase of happiness in the history of the world, because inequality has been growing for about as long as history. This is sacrifice to no one. This is Christmas for everyone. We have been saving happiness for 3000 years, we can begin to spend it. We are standing on the brink of self-annihilation, and of a golden age. Sowing is no fun, but the harvest from thinking on this is supreme. More at happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com, and I will be daily adding my efforts to communicate this. If you can't get enough of this, there is a 500-page book at www.globalhappiness.org [not an org].