COMMUNITIES & CO-OPERATION

Summary

Attention is also drawn to the importance of cheap, but high quality, Internet-based education services in order to recruit sufficient numbers of highly-gifted people necessary in a high-technology civilisation and also, by way of a moral free-rider, of a generally high quality skills training service available to all who are working at local and community skills.

Part A: Economic and Employment Trends of the next 30 years

(1) Cheap fossil fuel resources (oil, natural gas, superficial coal) will become largely exhausted. Annual consumption of fossil fuels is now running at about twice the volume that is being discovered and exploited. Consumption will rise even quicker if the Pacific Rim regions continue to industrialise at present rates. Alternative energy technologies, such as deep-mined coal, tar shales, solar or wave power, being more highly capital intensive, will not come on stream fast enough to smoothly replace existing fossil fuel supplies.

Energy prices will thus be significantly higher than at present and will affect the prices of all other products, particularly nitrogenous fertiliser for agriculture. Assuming the present ‘hardware mix’ of desirable consumer goods, economic growth will be severely constrained. Optimistically -- and quite beside the effect of automation (see below) -- the global number of direct and indirect workers will stabilise well within the next generation and probably within the decade; pessimistically, total numbers will start to decline significantly within the next decade, starting in the advanced countries and rippling outwards;

(2) Industrial investment by transnational corporations (TNCs) has been growing exponentially in recent years and is already at four times the average annual rate of investment from other sources. It is difficult to imagine a reversal of this trend and it is likely that most industrial and service production for mass consumption will be almost totally dominated by TNCs together with tied-in subcontractors. Within every consumer sector there will be the most intensive competition for survival between specialist TNCs;

(3) For the above two reasons, factories producing mass consumer goods will pass through the present phase of being sited mainly for reasons of cheap labour and will increasingly tend to be situated for access to cheap long-distance transport (that is, shipping), particularly where there are few planning and environmental restrictions -- such as the 10,000 miles of mainland and island coastlines of South-East Asia;

(4) The methods of production of the bulk of mass consumer products and services will become as fully routinised, automated and robotised as is physically possible well within the next generation, requiring a only a relatively small, but very highly-skilled, workforce for research & development, management and maintenance. Because of the development of sophisticated multi-sensory communications, much of this workforce would be able to live distantly from their workplaces if desired;

(5) Despite lower prices for most consumer goods in the immediate future for reasons of cheap energy costs and growing TNC competition, total consumer demand in advanced countries will decline seriously over the medium to longer term as average workforce incomes continue to be "hollowed-out" as has already been happening for the last two decades. Added to this, consumption due to private pensioners in advanced countries will decline as the existing fortunate generation of life-time workers retire and die over the coming generation. In short, popular wealth and average incomes in advanced nations will decline and will tend to level out to those of newly-industrialising countries;

(6) Advanced nation-state governments are already saying that they will not be able to afford to pay the same level of welfare benefits and social pensions in the next decade, even if based upon the taxation of existing proportions of full-time workforces within their populations. As workforces decline, however, that part of government taxation which is dependent on personal incomes will also decline. It is likely, too, that corporate taxation, as a proportion of the total, will also continue to decline steadily as it has been doing for the last 30 years in all OECD countries (from an average of 9 per cent to 6 per cent of government receipts) and that governments, being territorial institutions, will not be able to reverse this trend because of the growing international and intra-corporate trading operations of TNCs.

Part B: The likely resultant social structure in advanced countries

Thus, countries such as Korea,Taiwan and Singapore have become mature industrial countries from virtually a standing start within a generation with typical economic growths of 7 per cent per annum compared with advanced nation growth rates of 3 per cent at the most. More recently, some countries which are still mainly agrarian, only recently industrialising in a serious way (e.g. Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Guangdong and adjoining provinces of China, and several more) are able to develop even more rapidly, typically up to 10 per cent growth rates.

At present, we tend to divide the world unambiguously into Advanced Countries (ACs), Newly-industrialisingCountires (NICs), and the Third World. In a generation’s time we will be not be able to differentiate between ACs and NICs. As popularly-owned wealth dissipates in present AC countries, then most ACs and NICs will become very similar in many respects, the bulk of their populations having been both dispossessed of land for agriculture and rationalised out of industrial jobs. Both will be divided into disparate regions or localities with extreme contrasts between prosperity and poverty. In the world as a whole, the populations of countries will be situated somewhere on a scale between PPPs ("Poor with Pockets of Prosperity") or VPs ("Very poor").

The ultimate danger could be that of extreme ghettoisation and alienation -- an intensification of what is already occurring in all the major cities of ACs and NICs. However, there are two subtle, but potentially very powerful, factors working against the full development of this scenario, both due to the communications revolution now taking place.

Part C: Innovative social effects of the communications era

In due course, this will enable consumers, if so minded, to organise on a scale that has never been possible before and may, in time, establish a strong countervailing force to the policies of TNCs. The recent climb-down by Shell and Esso over the matter of the Brent oil platform, whether sensible or not, gives a glimpse of this. Management gurus such as Keniche Ohmae and Peter Drucker have often written about the potential power of consumerism in their writings, and the present revolution in communications seems to be the means by which it could come about.

Secondly -- more subtle but potentially even more powerful in its full effect -- the future will require highly-talented individuals. Indeed, the necessary skill threshold of those in work, already rising peceptibly in ACs, will rise higher and higher from year to year. Future society will require a far higher and more consistent quality of managerial elite than ever before. Because of the fundamental genetic fact of regression to the mean, sufficient numbers of highly-talented individuals will not be able to be recruited from the children of the existing elite at any time. Dynasties and nepotism, hitherto common throughout history because of the individual possession of power or wealth and validated by slow-changing institutions, will not be possible in a future world characterised by high skills and rapid technological change. Recruitment of the highly-gifted will have to be as broad and as efficient as possible in every generation if any high-technology civilisation is to be sustainable.

The above will be absolutely necessary. However, another very important aspect of the communication revolution should also be mentioned. One of its charactersitics is the vast and growing quantity of "altruistic" information and creativity that is available on the Internet, freely donated, for the most part, by individuals. As is well known, the Internet has become a phenomenal cornucopia of ideas and contacts. Thus, in addition to the more formal and rigorous educational courses that will have to become available in due course for the reasons in the above paragraph , it is likely that a considerable quantity of ad hoc educational material will also become available on the Internet in exactly the same way that "shareware" has already become freely available to any user who wants to download it. Also, commercial providers, such as Netscape and Sun Microsystems are adopting the strategy of providing alpha versions as"freeware". This further educational material will be invaluable to millions, and ultimately billions, of people who might want to pursue what might be called non-commercial skills such as craft and traditional skills available in their own community, and also non-vocational academic education. The new organisation, Interskills (see Part F below), will concentrate in this area of activitiy.

Part D: The declining role of official money

The increase in intra-corporate trading of large TNCs has already been mentioned whereby actual money transfers (and taxation) are avoided. The ability to maintain large up-to-date computerised databases is now encouraging the re-emergence of bartering and it is taking off in countries like Australia, Japan and the US (where there are now 1,000 brokerages and about $10 billion of trading per year). Also, the use of digital cash for trading within the Internet, and smart cards without, will also allow encourage the evolution of independent methods of measuring and acknowledging transactions without the use of official money.

At a more local level, the LETSystems devised by Michael Linton in Canada in the early 1980s are growing. Many hundreds have sprung up, so far mainly in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. In these systems, credits and debits are recorded within a registry as individuals carry out work for one another. LETSystems are intrinsically stable and only need a minimum repertoire of available skills in order to be successful. Efforts are already being made to establish larger registries so that individuals, once registered, can join different LETSystems, some local, some more distant with perhaps more specialised services to offer.

Intuitively, one feels that LETSystems have the potential to become a truly independent digital currency but which could also operate compatibly with other digital systems which are planned to operate in due course when retail trading on the Internet becomes more widespread. Current projections by those involved suggest that the transactions of the new LETSystems currencies could grow to at as large as the existing monetised economy and could thus effectively eliminate structural unemployment in the coming years and create as many further jobs as required.

Part E: Conclusion

Secondly, "parallel" economies will have to evolve in order to supply satisfying ways of life to those without access to sufficient official money, and thus maintain satisfying environments for themselves and their children. The mechanism by which these parallel economies can operate has been outlined above. There appears to be no conceivable barrier to the creation of full employment in such parallel economies, nor indeed to the development of good quality standards of living -- though the latter is likely to be characterised by far lower consumption of hardware goods than is now expected. (See http://www.u-net.com/gmlets/home.html)

It is suggested, therefore, that serious attention is paid to the development of both Internet-based educational methods, and Internet-linked credit/debit numeraires, both leading to the full participation of all individuals in daily life around them as the communications revolution gathers pace.