Resource Based Economy Quotes

Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money. This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption. This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.

When we are talking about cash flow - once again, nature is a great teacher. Cash is simply the base resource with which most activities predicate. In nature, cash is symbolized by water. Rarely is anything in nature ever lacking water. Even in the deserts, the life forms that live and grow there have figured out ‘cash flow’ or ‘water flow’…. They’ve figured out how to manage the flow of water relative to the tasks and objectives which require its use. If a cactus in the desert can figure out how to manage the flow of water relative to the tasks and objectives which require its use… then we can figure out how to manage the flow of cash relative to the tasks and objectives which require its use. If nature can invest wisely, so can we.

Most of today’s educational systems are built upon the same learning hierarchy: math and science at the top, humanities in the middle, art on the bottom. The reason for this is because these systems were developed in the nineteenth century, in the midst of the industrial revolution, when this hierarchy provided the best foundation for success. This is no longer the case. In a rapidly changing technological culture and an ever-growing information-based economy, creative ideas are the ultimate resource. Yet our current educational system does little to nourish this resource.

The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible.

the U.S., also has the highest rates of suicide, drug abuse, murder, incarcerations, and other negative social factors. Our economy is based on fighting wars—killing people and ravaging the planet—trading paper (mergers, derivatives, etc.), and selling each other things most of us don’t need. Meanwhile our planet is drowning in pollution, people are starving, our resources are dissipating, and our animals and plants are disappearing at shocking rates.

Advertising makes it possible for a company to make it our problem that it makes a product that solves a problem we do not and will never have.

Poor children face staggering challenges: increased risk of low birth weight, negative impacts on early cognitive development, higher incidents of childhood illnesses such as asthma and obesity, and greatly reduced chances of attending college (only about nine out of every one hundred kids born in poverty will earn a college degree). On top of this, poor children deal with greater degrees of environmental hazards from pollution, noise, and traffic, as well as other stressors harmful to their well-being. In a competitive and global knowledge-based economy, a nation's most valuable resource is its children. And yet we are reckless with this treasure.

A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast (10% per year since 2000), we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China. From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t. China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.

The separation-based economy exploits natural resources and most of the planet’s inhabitants for the profit of a few. It considers the earth an object, separate from us, with its resources existing solely for human use, rather than understanding the earth as a living biosphere of which we are just one part.

Incidentally, the same logic that would force one to accept the idea of the production of security by private business as economically the best solution to the problem of consumer satisfaction also forces one, so far as moral-ideological positions are concerned, to abandon the political theory of classical liberalism and take the small but nevertheless decisive step (from there) to the theory of libertarianism, or private property anarchism. Classical liberalism, with Ludwig von Mises as its foremost representative in the twentieth century, advocates a social system based on the nonaggression principle. And this is also what libertarianism advocates. But classical liberalism then wants to have this principle enforced by a monopolistic agency (the government, the state)—an organization, that is, which is not exclusively dependent on voluntary, contractual support by the consumers of its respective services, but instead has the right to unilaterally determine its own income, i.e., the taxes to be imposed on consumers in order to do its job in the area of security production. Now, however plausible this might sound, it should be clear that it is inconsistent. Either the principle of nonaggression is valid, in which case the state as a privileged monopolist is immoral, or business built on and around aggression—the use of force and of noncontractual means of acquiring resources—is valid, in which case one must toss out the first theory. It is impossible to sustain both contentions and not to be inconsistent unless, of course, one could provide a principle that is more fundamental than both the nonaggression principle and the states’ right to aggressive violence and from which both, with the respective limitations regarding the domains in which they are valid, can be logically derived. However, liberalism never provided any such principle, nor will it ever be able to do so, since, to argue in favor of anything presupposes one’s right to be free of aggression. Given the fact then that the principle of nonaggression cannot be argumentatively contested as morally valid without implicitly acknowledging its validity, by force of logic one is committed to abandoning liberalism and accepting instead its more radical child: libertarianism, the philosophy of pure capitalism, which demands that the production of security be undertaken by private business too.

I still worry about Africa, we are slaves to western and Eastern Brands and we do not cherish and love our own. We are not even in charge of our economies because we depend heavily on what happens in the East or West, Worse-off we still judge each other based on skin color because those from Northern Africa and even some in East Africa believe that they are not Africans and they do not integrate with the darker Africans. For centuries we are still being victimized by other races from other continents, because they despise our dark skin and think that we are lesser than them.. Xenophobia still lingers and some have the cold heart to kill their black African brothers and sisters and yet the people who owe them reparation and economic freedom are originally from the western countries. We still are held captive by our governments , who abuse our resources only to feed their pockets at the expense our crumbling nations. Why should we continue to suffer when we can apply Pan Africanism and Rise above the Western and Eastern Countries, but sadly we do not because we are not united.. Africa must unite to solve its problems, Happy Africa Day

Further, any way of life based on the importation of resources is also functionally based on violence, because if your way of life requires the importation of resources, trade will never be sufficiently reliable: if people in the next watershed over won't trade you for some necessary resource, you will take it, because you need it. So, to bring this to the present, we could all become enlightened, and the US military would still have to be huge: how else will they get access to the oil they need to run the economy, oil that just happens to lie under someone else's land? The point is that no matter what we think of the irredeemability of this culture's mass psychology or system of rewards, this culture–civilization–is also irredeemable on a purely functional level.

Price controls and the direct allocation of resources by political institutions require much more explicit knowledge on the part of a small number of planners than a market economy requires so that it can be coordinated by prices to which millions of dollars respond. people based on first-hand knowledge of their own circumstances and preferences, and the relatively low prices that each individual must handle.

Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into a mad act of collective suicide, and therefore forced the most powerful nations on earth to find alternative and peaceful ways to resolve conflicts. Simultaneously, the global economy has been transformed from a material-based economy into a knowledge-based economy. Previously the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells. Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

the market economy is based on cyclical consumption and it really doesn’t matter what is being produced, how it is being produced, or why. If demand or production slows, so too does the movement of money, and when this happens, the economy contracts, systemically reducing the standard of living for many. Ecologically, this means capitalism is structurally oblivious to humanity’s existence on a finite planet. The system wants to produce, not conserve. In fact, if you think about it, you will discover an interesting paradox to market logic: the fact that capitalism is a scarcity-based economic system that actually seeks infinite consumption. In other words, it favors a threshold of goods scarcity to secure competitive profits, theorized as a model to properly manage scarcity, optimizing resource use and distribution. Yet, at the same time, the system demands more and more human dissatisfaction and “want” in order to function and grow. It rewards consumption, with no inherent incentive to conserve anything.

All of the solutions to our growth-based problems involve some form of self-restraint. That’s why most of those solutions remain just good ideas. That’s also why we will probably hit the wall, and why the outcomes described in the previous chapters of this book are likely. The sustainability revolution will occur. The depletion of nonrenewable resources ensures that humankind will eventually base its economy on renewable resources harvested at rates of natural replenishment. But that revolution will be driven by crisis.

Previously the main sources of wealth were material assets such as gold mines, wheat fields and oil wells. Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. Hence as knowledge became the most important economic resource, the profitability of war declined and wars became increasingly restricted to those parts of the world – such as the Middle East and Central Africa – where the economies are still old-fashioned material-based economies.

If we construct an economy where quantities are controlled, based on the belief there is never enough for all, then we must compete to determine the winners. We begin this with grades in the first grade. There is the presumption that competition is essential and so there must be a normal distribution of grades. All students cannot receive high marks. If I get an A, someone in the class must perform poorly. It is an early lesson in how the marketplace ideology works. In a community organized around abundance, competition will occur, but it is not built into the system as a core design element. In a neighborly culture, the abundance of resources becomes the design element

Abundance and scarcity In a society where value is created by the manufacture of goods or the allocation of limited resources, it’s not a surprise that organizations seek scarcity. We hesitate to share, because if I give you this, then I don’t have it any more. We erect barriers and create rules to make it difficult for some people to have access to these limited resources. While we don’t set out to become miserly, it’s an economic instinct, because what’s yours is no long mine. Even though we give lip service to sharing when kids show up for kindergarten classes, most of school is organized around the same ideas. We rank students, we cut players from the roster, we grade on a curve. Success, we teach, is scarce. Our new economy, though, is based on abundance, the abundance that comes from ideas and access. If I benefit when everyone knows my idea, then the more people I give the idea to, the better we all do. If I benefit when I earn a reputation leading, connecting and creating positive change, then I’ll benefit if I can offer these insights to anyone who can benefit from them. With an abundance mindset, we intentionally create goods that can be shared. It’s not based on our traditional factory-based economy, but it works now (in fact, it’s just about all that works)… engaging with the mesh, building communities that benefit from sharing resources instead of destroying them is a strategy that scales. With an abundance mindset, we create ideas and services that do better when people share.

Kennedy was clear that the Apollo project would cost a lot of money – and it did. And while he and NASA had to constantly defend the use of the budget, in the end the pressure and urgency to ‘beat the Russians’ made the money come through. Indeed, the urgency to win is why money is always available for wartime missions – whether in the world wars or Vietnam or Iraq. Money seems to be created for this purpose. There is no reason why a ‘whatever it takes’ mentality cannot be used for social problems. Yet the conventional approach is to assume that budgets are fixed, and so if money is spent in one area, it will be at the expense of another area. For example, if you want new energy infrastructure, you can’t have new hospitals as well. But what if budgets were based on outcomes to be reached, as they were for the moon landing and in wars? What if the first question is not ‘Can we afford it?’ but ‘What do we really want to do? And how do we create the resources required to realize the mission?

Pull approaches differ significantly from push approaches in terms of how they organize and manage resources. Push approaches are typified by "programs" - tightly scripted specifications of activities designed to be invoked by known parties in pre-determined contexts. Of course, we don't mean that all push approaches are software programs - we are using this as a broader metaphor to describe one way of organizing activities and resources. Think of thick process manuals in most enterprises or standardized curricula in most primary and secondary educational institutions, not to mention the programming of network television, and you will see that institutions heavily rely on programs of many types to deliver resources in pre-determined contexts. Pull approaches, in contrast, tend to be implemented on "platforms" designed to flexibly accommodate diverse providers and consumers of resources. These platforms are much more open-ended and designed to evolve based on the learning and changing needs of the participants. Once again, we do not mean to use platforms in the literal sense of a tangible foundation, but in a broader, metaphorical sense to describe frameworks for orchestrating a set of resources that can be configured quickly and easily to serve a broad range of needs. Think of Expedia's travel service or the emergency ward of a hospital and you will see the contrast with the hard-wired push programs.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.

If the technology platforms of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions aided in the severing and enclosing of the Earth’s myriad ecological interdependencies for market exchange and personal gain, the IoT platform of the Third Industrial Revolution reverses the process. What makes the IoT a disruptive technology in the way we organize economic life is that it helps humanity reintegrate itself into the complex choreography of the biosphere, and by doing so, dramatically increases productivity without compromising the ecological relationships that govern the planet. Using less of the Earth’s resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere.

The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items

Growing your own food is like printing your own money. When you grow your own food, you supply your family with meals and help them survive, without the help of a food business. This is how we begin to shift toward a more resource-based economy, by providing our own resources in the safety of our own backyards. Make sure the food you grow is organic and do not use any harmful pesticides or fertilizers. By growing your own food, you can also build a great community. People will work together for the common goal of eating a healthy meal.

The factors that usually decide presidential elections—the economy, likability of the candidates, and so on—added up to a wash, and the outcome came down to a few key swing states. Mitt Romney’s campaign followed a conventional polling approach, grouping voters into broad categories and targeting each one or not. Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, said that “if we can win independents in Ohio, we can win this race.” Romney won them by 7 percent but still lost the state and the election. In contrast, President Obama hired Rayid Ghani, a machine-learning expert, as chief scientist of his campaign, and Ghani proceeded to put together the greatest analytics operation in the history of politics. They consolidated all voter information into a single database; combined it with what they could get from social networking, marketing, and other sources; and set about predicting four things for each individual voter: how likely he or she was to support Obama, show up at the polls, respond to the campaign’s reminders to do so, and change his or her mind about the election based on a conversation about a specific issue. Based on these voter models, every night the campaign ran 66,000 simulations of the election and used the results to direct its army of volunteers: whom to call, which doors to knock on, what to say. In politics, as in business and war, there is nothing worse than seeing your opponent make moves that you don’t understand and don’t know what to do about until it’s too late. That’s what happened to the Romney campaign. They could see the other side buying ads in particular cable stations in particular towns but couldn’t tell why; their crystal ball was too fuzzy. In the end, Obama won every battleground state save North Carolina and by larger margins than even the most accurate pollsters had predicted. The most accurate pollsters, in turn, were the ones (like Nate Silver) who used the most sophisticated prediction techniques; they were less accurate than the Obama campaign because they had fewer resources. But they were a lot more accurate than the traditional pundits, whose predictions were based on their expertise. You might think the 2012 election was a fluke: most elections are not close enough for machine learning to be the deciding factor. But machine learning will cause more elections to be close in the future. In politics, as in everything, learning is an arms race. In the days of Karl Rove, a former direct marketer and data miner, the Republicans were ahead. By 2012, they’d fallen behind, but now they’re catching up again.

It's not surprising that Idaho, with a noticeably smaller urban population and more resource based economy, is much more conservative than Washington and Oregon.

A commercial, high-tech, service-based economy prevailed throughout the region, and a growing majority placed environmental protection ahead of resource extraction. Rural communities have won delays but, despite their efforts, forests have been preserved, wolves roam and multiply across the plains, and rivers and wetlands thrive under federal protection.

The vague contention that the economy must be decarbonised via the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy is inadequate when building the new infrastructure required currently relies on continued and expanded environmental plunder, such as the mining of cobalt and lithium for batteries. Resource extraction is responsible for 50% of global emissions, with minerals and metal mining responsible for 20% of emissions even before the manufacturing stage.[36] The ‘green’ industrial revolution proposed by social democrats may end up with a carbon neutral system of production by the time it is finished, but in the meantime it would be anything but. That mankind and nature have been so profoundly alienated from each other under capitalism requires that they be reunited if the planet is to remain habitable.[37] One of the ways that this alienation has been most concretely institutionalised has been through the international prohibition and under-utilisation of the hemp and cannabis plants, the most prolific and versatile crops on Earth that were used for thousands of years before capitalism for food, fuel, medicine, clothing and construction. As we shall see, not only does hemp remain capable of providing for most of humanity’s needs, it is the key not only to reversing desertification and stabilising the climate, but also furthering technological and industrial progress. We therefore argue that saving the planet is bound up with ending this alienation and completing the transition from a labour-intensive extraction-based economy to a hemp-based fully automated system of production. A green industrial revolution must be precisely that – green.

Approximately 1 billion people currently have access to banking, credit, and international finance capabilities—primarily the upper classes, the Western nations. Six and a half billion people on this planet have no connection to the world of money. They operate in cash-based societies with very little access to international resources. They don’t need banks. Two billion of these people are already on the internet. With a simple application download, they can immediately become participants in an international economy, using an international currency that can be transmitted anywhere with no fees and no government controls.

Most émigrés, lacking the resources to establish themselves in England, traveled to other British outposts in North America known only by maps and rumors. The most popular destination for loyalists in the deep South was East Florida, which grew from a population of 4,000 to 17,000 in a single year.105 Within a few months of their arrival, however, the émigrés learned that Great Britain had ceded East Florida to Spain in the peace settlement. Not wishing to become Spanish subjects, the vast majority decided to move on. About one-third returned to the United States, some creeping back to their former homes, most settling on the frontier or some other location where their prior loyalties would not be known. Many others, including Thomas Brown and Robert Cunningham, sailed for the Bahamas, with a plantation economy based upon slavery. Those who carried their slaves to Jamaica, ironically, wound up protesting the trade policies of the British Parliament, just as their rebel opponents had done. Southern loyalists without slaves and nowhere better to go headed north to Canada, but many did not take well to the cold, and they too petitioned the British government, claiming it was “altogether impossible . . . to clear the ground, and raise the necessaries of life, in a Climate to southern Constitutions inhospitable and Severe.”106 They would prefer, they said, to trade in their homesteads in Canada for a small piece of the Bahamas.

There is an attitude in the West which tends to assume that western norms are adequate and capable of universal application. Admittedly, there are some people who criticise the predominant western belief in growth economics, who worry about basing a national economy on debt, and who question the very notion that people and/or institutions may own land and other natural resources. Alas, there are all too few who question the western and now almost ubiquitous democratic structure which is based on the divisive binary vote

Our economy is based on the belief that we can extract resources boundlessly, use them inefficiently, and discard them wantonly, drawing from the planet more than it can regenerate and polluting more than we can clean up.

In 1931, Japan went broke—i.e., it was forced to draw down its gold reserves, abandon the gold standard, and float its currency, which depreciated it so greatly that Japan ran out of buying power. These terrible conditions and large wealth gaps led to fighting between the left and the right. By 1932, there was a massive upsurge in right-wing nationalism and militarism, in the hope that order and economic stability could be forcibly restored. Japan set out to get the natural resources (e.g., oil, iron, coal, and rubber) and human resources (i.e., slave labor) it needed by seizing them from other countries, invading Manchuria in 1931 and spreading out through China and Asia. As with Germany, it could be argued that Japan’s path of military aggression to get needed resources was more cost-effective than relying on classic trading and economic practices. In 1934, there was severe famine in parts of Japan, causing even more political turbulence and reinforcing the right-wing, militaristic, nationalistic, and expansionistic movement. In the years that followed, Japan’s top-down fascist command economy grew stronger, building a military-industrial complex to protect its existing bases in East Asia and northern China and support its excursions into other countries. As was also the case in Germany, while most Japanese companies remained privately held, their production was controlled by the government. What is fascism? Consider the following three big choices that a country has to make when selecting its approach to governance: 1) bottom-up (democratic) or top-down (autocratic) decision making, 2) capitalist or communist (with socialist in the middle) ownership of production, and 3) individualistic (which treats the well-being of the individual with paramount importance) or collectivist (which treats the well-being of the whole with paramount importance). Pick the one from each category that you believe is optimal for your nation’s values and ambitions and you have your preferred approach. Fascism is autocratic, capitalist, and collectivist. Fascists believe that top-down autocratic leadership, in which the government directs the production of privately held companies such that individual gratification is subordinated to national success, is the best way to make the country and its people wealthier and more powerful.

It was Zhang Zhidong who suggested this guiding ideology during the reforms of the late Qing. 'Chinese learning at the base' meant preserving the political system of the late Qing, and 'Western learning for application' meant introducing and utilizing Western experience to strengthen the political system, consolidate rule, and prolong the life of the declining Qing dynasty. In Den Xiaoping's era, 'Chinese learning as the base' preserved the road, theory, and political system left behind by Mao, and 'Western learning for application' was aimed at developing the economy and thereby bolstering and prolonging the political system that Mao left behind. However, since the political system of the Mao era was mainly imported from the Soviet Union, it would be more accurate to say 'Soviet learning as the base.' Economic reforms drew China into a new era, but the reforms were led by the bureaucratic clique that was the ultimate victor in the Cultural Revolution. They controlled all the country's resources and the direction of reform, and in objective terms decided who would pay the cost of reforms and how the benefits of reform would be distributed.

So, let's draw out the connections between the gig economy, which treats human beings like a raw resource from which to extract wealth and then discard, and the dig economy, in which the extractive companies treat the earth with the very same disdain. And let's show exactly how we can move from that gig and dig economy to a society based on principles of care and repair; where the work of our caregivers and of our land and water protectors is respected and valued; a world where no one and nowhere is thrown away, whether in firetrap housing estates or on hurricane-ravaged islands.

Adam Smith’s political economy is based on a chain of three arguments. The first we called the Economizer Argument, or the claim that each person naturally seeks out the most economical use of the resources available to him to achieve his goals, whatever they are. Whatever one’s goals, one wants to achieve them as efficiently as possible. Smith’s claim is that no one needs to tell us to do this: we are psychologically constructed, as it were, to do so already.

If you have economies of scale, penetration pricing often works best Would your business benefit from economies of scale? (Most web businesses do.) If so, your ideal pricing strategy may be penetration pricing—charging a low price, basing your financial model on eventually reaching market-dominating economies of scale. Supply-side economies of scale mean that your profit margins increase the more you sell, because as you sell more, your cost of sales (unit costs) usually becomes lower, and your fixed costs become a smaller fraction of your overall costs. Demand-side economies of scale mean that the more customers you get, the more value each customer gets from your service, for the following reasons. You may benefit from having a network of customers. For example, if a phone system had only two users, only one type of call could be made (one between User A and User B). If it had three users, then three types of call could be made (A–B, B–C and A-C). If it had twelve users, sixty-six different types of calls could be made. The overall value of a phone system to its users is roughly proportional to the square of the number of users. You may benefit from there being a market of complementary products and services. The project-management web app Basecamp has many integrations, which it promotes on its website. At the bottom of the page, Basecamp shows off how quickly it’s acquiring new users, to persuade other companies to add integrations. You may benefit from having a bigger knowledge base, more forums, or more trained users. The ecosystem of knowledge around a product can be valuable in itself. WordPress grows because it’s easy to find a WordPress developer and it’s easy for those developers to find answers to their questions. You may benefit from the perception that yours is the standard. Users are aware of the value of choosing the ultimate winner—especially when they have to invest time and resources into using your company—so they will be attracted by the perception that you’ll win.

Living resources in international waters and/or territories where sovereignty is disputed provide ideal opportunities for the maximization of exploitation leading to the ‘tragedy of commons’. The IWC (International Whaling Commission) was intended to introduce a system of regulation and restraint based on scientific knowledge, in a manner pioneered by the Discovery Investigations. Notwithstanding conservation measures and changing public opinion, reductions in whaling were also achieved by the changing political economies of the industry. It is unlikely that commercial whaling will ever return to Antarctica, apart from ‘scientific whaling’ by Japan.

one of the things we’re concerned about is the quest for infinite growth (an unavoidable feature of capitalism) on a finite planet. With that imperative, the biosphere is now subsumed under the economy. This has to be reversed. That is, the biosphere is now seen in strictly utilitarian terms to be simply a storehouse of resources, and/or a receptacle for waste. Also under capitalist compulsion, people now serve the economy, rather than the other way around. Development should be about people, not about objects. Development, often seen as synonymous with progress, is equated with growth, measured as GNP or GDP, sometimes per capita. This must be challenged, and we need differential criteria and different metrics for what constitutes development and progress. Right now these are equated. Development doesn’t necessarily require growth, development has no limits, growth has limits or should. And this is clearly referring back to the growth/de-growth debate that we read about. All of this is underlain by issues of what constitutes happiness, satisfaction, and quality of life. What do these actually essential elements of life actually depend on? At the moment, under our current capitalist system, and its associated common sense, these aspects are measured by the acquisition of more and more things. But we don’t go readily into this mindset, we have to actually be induced or seduced. Global advertising spending in 2014 was $488.48 billion and is projected to grow to $757.44 billion by 2021. So, think about the enormous effort, the enormous, strenuous, and continuous effort to persuade people that things that they merely want are really things that they must have, that they need. And this is the business of marketing and advertising. And as Noam pointed out previously, this completely distorts the notion of the so-called free market in which rational people make rational choices based on real needs.

The result is a slow-life strategy, with lower birth rates, slower development, and more resources and care put into each child. Thus, children do fewer things on their own (fewer walk to school by themselves or stay at home alone), teens are less independent (fewer get their driver’s license or date), young adults postpone adult milestones (marrying and having children later than earlier generations), life stages once considered middle-aged tilt younger (“fifty is the new forty”), staying healthy past retirement age is the rule rather than the exception, and life expectancies stretch toward 80. The entire developmental trajectory has slowed down, from childhood to older adulthood. These slower life trajectories are all ultimately caused by technology, including modern medical care (which lengthens life spans), birth control (allowing people to have fewer children), labor-saving devices (which slow aging), and a knowledge-based economy (which requires more years of education). Especially at older ages, the slowing is actually biologically quantifiable.

The growth of wealth in the Western world, like that in Japan or China, has long been based on the international division of labor and the feverish exploitation of natural and human resources worldwide. All these accumulations of wealth that have taken place on our planet depend on a global economic system, and it is at that level that the question of justice should be raised and the march toward equality pursued.

Definite Pessimism A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it. Perhaps surprisingly, China is probably the most definitely pessimistic place in the world today. When Americans see the Chinese economy grow ferociously fast (10% per year since 2000), we imagine a confident country mastering its future. But that’s because Americans are still optimists, and we project our optimism onto China. From China’s viewpoint, economic growth cannot come fast enough. Every other country is afraid that China is going to take over the world; China is the only country afraid that it won’t. China can grow so fast only because its starting base is so low. The easiest way for China to grow is to relentlessly copy what has already worked in the West. And that’s exactly what it’s doing: executing definite plans by burning ever more coal to build ever more factories and skyscrapers. But with a huge population pushing resource prices higher, there’s no way Chinese living standards can ever actually catch up to those of the richest countries, and the Chinese know it. This is why the Chinese leadership is obsessed with the way in which things threaten to get worse. Every senior Chinese leader experienced famine as a child, so when the Politburo looks to the future, disaster is not an abstraction. The Chinese public, too, knows that winter is coming. Outsiders are fascinated by the great fortunes being made inside China, but they pay less attention to the wealthy Chinese trying hard to get their money out of the country. Poorer Chinese just save everything they can and hope it will be enough. Every class of people in China takes the future deadly seriously.

Page 61-2 ... Rome expanded rapidly ... and became master over the entire Mediterranean Basin. It then had unlimited resources in terms of land, money, and slaves. It collected taxes or tribute throughout its empire and was able to transfer to the central capital massive quantities of foodstuffs and manufactured items. The peasants and the artisans of Italy saw their economic base disappear as this Mediterranean economy was "globalized" by the political domination of Rome. The society was polarized between, on the one hand, a mass of economically useless plebeians and, on the other, a predatory plutocracy. A minority gorged with wealth oversaw the remaining proletarianized population. The middle-classes collapsed, a process that brought about the end of the republic and the beginning of the political form known as "empire" in conformity with the observations made by Aristotle about the importance of intermediate social classes for the stability of political systems. Since one could not eliminate the plebeians, intractable but geographically central as they were, they came to be nourished and distracted at the empire's expense with "bread and circuses." Page 64-5: The positive American trade balance, when only "advanced technology" is counted, dropped from 35 billion dollars in 1990 to 5 billion in 2001 and had disappeared entirely to become one more element in the overall trade deficit in January 2002. This fall in economic strength is not compensated for by the activities of American-based multinationals. Since 1998 the profits that they bring back into the country amount to less than what foreign companies that have set up shop in the United States are taking back to their own countries. Page 68: In conformity with classical economic theory, the general opening up of commercial exchange has brought about an increase in inequality throughout the world. This general exchange tends to introduce into each country the same disparities in revenue that exist at the level of the whole planet. ... The compression of worker revenues caused by free trade revives the traditional dilemma of capitalism that has now spread across the globe: low salaries do not allow for the absorption of increases in production. Page 17: In developed countries a new class is emerging that comprises roughly 20 percent of the population in terms of sheer numbers but controls about half of each nation's wealth. This new class has more and more trouble putting up with the constraint of universal suffrage.

of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. On being compelled by force of arms to give up their slave workforce, Deep Southerners developed caste and sharecropper systems to meet their labor needs, as well as a system of poll taxes and literacy tests to keep former slaves and white rabble out of the political process. When these systems were challenged by African Americans and the federal government, they rallied poor whites in their nation, in Tidewater, and in Appalachia to their cause through fearmongering: The races would mix. Daughters would be defiled. Yankees would take away their guns and Bibles and convert their children to secular humanism, environmentalism, communism, and homosexuality. Their political hirelings discussed criminalizing abortion, protecting the flag from flag burners, stopping illegal immigration, and scaling back government spending when on the campaign trail; once in office, they focused on cutting taxes for the wealthy, funneling massive subsidies to the oligarchs’ agribusinesses and oil companies, eliminating labor and environmental regulations, creating “guest worker” programs to secure cheap farm labor from the developing world, and poaching manufacturing jobs from higher-wage unionized industries in Yankeedom, New Netherland, or the Midlands. It’s a strategy financial analyst Stephen Cummings has likened to “a high-technology version of the plantation economy of the Old South,” with the working and middle classes playing the role of sharecroppers.[1] For the oligarchs the greatest challenge has been getting Greater Appalachia into their coalition and keeping it there. Appalachia has relatively few African

As we'll see throughout this book, nature's problem-solving strategies offer immense opportunities for wealth creation in a new economy. Whether the shatter-resistant ceramics of an abalone shell, the superior drag resistance demonstrated by seaweeds, or the pure combustion of plant photosynthesis, impacted industries range from construction to transportation to medicine to software. Nature's paradigm does what human technology tries to do-and does it sustainably without stripping out the base resources that create wealth. So what's preventing us from more rapid adoption of bio-inspired design?

The multinational is a problem precisely because its decisions are based on economic rationality and divorced from political sovereignty. There is no solution. The multinational is a political problem not because of anything it does or does not do. It is a problem because political sovereignty and economic reality no longer coincide. It does the multinational no good to protest that it and each of its subsidiaries are “good corporate citizens” of the country in which each operates. Of course, it and each of its subsidiaries observe the laws—at least to the same extent to which the country’s nationals observe it. But if the phrase is meant to imply—as it usually does—that the multinational in every country in which it operates thinks and acts in terms of that country’s national economy and market, it is nonsense. To do so would deny the whole logic of the multinational corporation, which is to optimize resources within the world market reality.

remedy the “anarchy” of the market, the socialist planned economy is utterly irrational. Its irrationality is due to the elimination of the essential indices for determining rational production and distribution – namely, prices. Von Mises showed that prices represent the incredibly thick and vital data sets required for allocating productive resources for commodity production and calibrating these to demand. Socialism is irrational because by beginning without prices for the machinery of production, no rational criteria could ever emerge for allocating resources to specific production processes. And when unpriced consumer goods are added to the mix, the chaos multiplies – unless, that is, political force is applied, and it always is. Eliminating prices, the socialist economy cannot provide the feedback loops required for determining what to produce or how much of it to produce. Cancerous, over-sized productive capacities in one sector of the economy are paralleled by relatively anemic productive capacities in another, and so on. And resorting to the labor theory of value won’t fix the problem. The socially average amount of labor time required to produce a commodity, even if it determines a commodity’s value (a doubtful claim in any case), is by no means an adequate index for determining the amount of resources to devote to its production. This means that socialism fails not only at resource allocation but also at the economic representation of the people it claims to champion. Absent price mechanisms, economic “voters,” or consumers, have no way to voice their needs and wants. Production and distribution must be based on the non-democratic decision-making of centralized authorities. Those who really care about the working masses must reject socialism for its incapacity to establish economic democracy, its most fundamental reason for being.

WaterLess Urinal Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission) accelerate sanitation coverage in rural and urban areas. Stakeholders and people from all sections of society have welcomed it as a major step to achieve a healthy and hygienic environment for the citizens of India. This is retrofit waterless urinal technology that gets fitted at base of urinal bowl. It consists of an inlet and outlet cartridge through which urine passes and seals the outlet once the urine is drained out. The technology converts conventional urinal into waterless urinal. No need to remove the old urinal bowl. Advantages:- Waterless urinals do not require a constant source of water Can be built and repaired with locally available materials Low capital and operating costs Waterless urinals produce fewer odours than urinals with water flush and also have no problems with urinal cakes (odour and urinal cakes occur when urine is mixed with water) Waterless urinals contribute to water saving at the greatest possible degree Waterless urinals allow the pure and undiluted collection of urine for reuse, e.g. as fertilizer in urban farming (after appropriate treatment, e.g. storage) and can contribute to closed loop economy, or for effective anaerobic treatment by e.g. an anaerobic ammonium oxidation (anamox) reactor Surface water and aquifers are protected from nutrients and pharmaceuticals if the urine is collected separately Special Feature :- One time fitment Hygienic - Dry restroom prevents bacteria cultivation No Flushing Allocation of transport resources, including the management and regulation of existing transportation activities. No Consumables Waterless and Odorless No Recurring Costs Longer Shelf Life Low & Easy Maintenance Just wipe and clean Structural Feature :- Thin-walled lighted weight Low porosity Ease of transportation Modular Design Flexible in design Minimal surface cracking

Back in 1990, the futurist George Gilder demonstrated his prescience when he wrote in his book Microcosm, “The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.” Just over twenty years later, in 2011, the venture capitalist (and Netscape cofounder) Marc Andreessen validated Gilder’s thesis in his Wall Street Journal op-ed “Why Software Is Eating the World.” Andreessen pointed out that the world’s largest bookstore (Amazon), video provider (Netflix), recruiter (LinkedIn), and music companies (Apple/ Spotify/ Pandora) were software companies, and that even “old economy” stalwarts like Walmart and FedEx used software (rather than “things”) to drive their businesses. Despite—or perhaps because of—the growing dominance of bits, the power of software has also made it easier to scale up atom-based businesses as well. Amazon’s retail business is heavily based in atoms—just think of all those Amazon shipping boxes piled up in your recycling bin! Amazon originally outsourced its logistics to Ingram Book Company, but its heavy investment in inventory management systems and warehouses as it grew turned infrastructure

One of the frequent attacks on the behavior of the free market is based on the Georgist bugbear of natural resources held off the market for speculative purposes. We have dealt with this alleged problem above. Another, and diametrically opposite, attack is the common one that the free market wastes resources, especially depletable resources. Future generations are allegedly robbed by the greed of the present. Such reasoning would lead to the paradoxical conclusion that noneof the resource be consumed at all. For whenever, at any time, a man consumes a depletable resource (here we use “consumes” in a broader sense to include “uses up” in production), he is leaving less of a stock for himself or his descendants to draw upon. It is a fact of life that wheneverany amount of a depletable resource is used up, less is left for the future, and therefore anysuch consumption could just as well be called “robbery of the future,” if one chooses to define robbery in such unusual terms. Once we grant any amount of use to the depletable resource, we have to discard the robbery-of-the-future argument and accept the individual preferences of the market. There is then no more reason to assume that the market will use the resources too fast than to assume the opposite. The market will tend to use resources at precisely the rate that the consumers desire.

These four changes—in the nature of work, education, social values, and communication technology—make it harder for dictators to dominate citizens in the old way. Harsh laws and bureaucratic regulations provoke furious responses from previously docile groups. These groups have new skills and networks that help them resist. At the same time, violent repression and comprehensive censorship destroy the innovation now central to progress. Eventually, the expansion of the highly educated, creative class, with its demands for self-expression and participation, makes it difficult to resist a move to some form of democracy. But so long as this class is not too large and the leader has the resources to co-opt or censor its members, an alternative is spin dictatorship. At least for a while, the ruler can buy off the informed with government contracts and privileges. So long as they stay loyal, he can tolerate their niche magazines, websites, and international networking events. He can even hire the creative types to design an alternative reality for the masses. This strategy will not work against a Sakharov. But Sakharovs are rare. With a modern, centrally controlled mass media, they pose little threat. Co-opting the informed takes resources. When these run low, spin dictators turn to censorship, which is often cheaper. They need not censor everything. All that really matters is to stop opposition media reaching a mass audience. And here the uneven dynamics of cultural change help. Early in the postindustrial era, most people still have industrial-era values. They are conformist and risk averse. The less educated are alienated from the creative types by resentment, economic anxiety, and attachment to tradition. Spin dictators can exploit these sentiments, rallying the remaining workers against the “counterculture” while branding the intellectuals as disloyal, sacrilegious, or sexually deviant. Such smears inoculate the leader’s base against opposition revelations. As long as the informed are not too strong, manipulation works well. Dictators can resist political demands without destroying the creative economy or revealing their own brutality to the public.

These four changes—in the nature of work, education, social values, and communication technology—make it harder for dictators to dominate citizens in the old way. Harsh laws and bureaucratic regulations provoke furious responses from previously docile groups. These groups have new skills and networks that help them resist. At the same time, violent repression and comprehensive censorship destroy the innovation now central to progress. Eventually, the expansion of the highly educated, creative class, with its demands for self-expression and participation, makes it difficult to resist a move to some form of democracy. But so long as this class is not too large and the leader has the resources to co-opt or censor its members, an alternative is spin dictatorship. At least for a while, the ruler can buy off the informed with government contracts and privileges. So long as they stay loyal, he can tolerate their niche magazines, websites, and international networking events. He can even hire the creative types to design an alternative reality for the masses. This strategy will not work against a Sakharov. But Sakharovs are rare. With a modern, centrally controlled mass media, they pose little threat. Co-opting the informed takes resources. When these run low, spin dictators turn to censorship, which is often cheaper. They need not censor everything. All that really matters is to stop opposition media reaching a mass audience. And here the uneven dynamics of cultural change help. Early in the postindustrial era, most people still have industrial-era values. They are conformist and risk averse. The less educated are alienated from the creative types by resentment, economic anxiety, and attachment to tradition. Spin dictators can exploit these sentiments, rallying the remaining workers against the “counterculture” while branding the intellectuals as disloyal, sacrilegious, or sexually deviant. Such smears inoculate the leader’s base against opposition revelations. As long as the informed are not too strong, manipulation works well. Dictators can resist political demands without destroying the creative economy or revealing their own brutality to the public.