standardsoflife

Whatever happened to the European social model?

“Can the debt and deficit laden European welfare states . . . rescue their public finances and reform their social market economies?” asks Timothy Garton-Ash in a column in the Guardian this week. Can any of the Western democracies work their way out of their sovereign debt while maintaining their social fabric? Including the U.S.!?

Even before the bank debt crisis was transferred to the public purse in 2008, gaping holes had started to open in the public accounts of every developed society that was unable to exploit fortuitously local natural resources. The full development of the “social market economy” had not actually been possible until the latter half of the 20th century, and then only the most industrialized societies were able to give it a try. And give it a try they did, without employing the same cold, hard analytical skills that they used to develop their burgeoning, ravenous and muscular economies.

The reality in those countries that did look like social market economies was that they had split into two internal realities. Cold, clear market economies on the one side and warm, fuzzy political fantasies on the other. So long as the political reality didn’t infringe on the operations of the market reality, each could live in their own space, peering occasionally with bemusement into the other reality. The deal centered around the political reality being able to sustain itself without imposing too great a burden on the market reality.
You could ask anyone on the market side and they’d tell you that the politicians weren’t living in reality, that their math skills stunk, and that that “it” would never work – but heck, so long as vast swathes of society were happy to be deluded, and those delusions didn’t interfere too much with the “natural” market forces that really made the world tick… who were they to try and correct the fallacies, right the wrongs or destroy the fantasy?
On the other side, in the political reality, everyone was agreed, with great frustration, that the inhabitants of the market reality were just one enlightenment short of recognizing the inevitable self-destruction inherent in a market economy model that failed to recognize that it was supposed to serve the needs of the political reality.

The disconnect was pretty universal and early in life most people picked or found themselves in one reality or the other, which then shaped and framed their worldview thence forward. The actual reality, the real shared universe, got little attention and virtually no recognition.
What allowed these two realities to persist for a century, and what has now virtually collapsed in 2010, was the subtly corrupted accounting on which the market economies were based, and which sustained the illusion of self-funding welfare societies.

At the beginning, the social welfare provided was very meagre and was available to only a few. For instance, pensions were only subsistence and only a few lived long enough to collect them. In the middle, the economies that supported (funded) the slightly better welfare programs of their age were unconsciously over-muscular, leveraging unbalanced trade, resource exploitation, uncosted environmental pollution and unfair competition to generate unnatural wealth (profits) that made the welfare states that relied on them look affordable. In fact, they weren’t.
The collapse of the Soviet communist system mid-way through this period just “proved” to everyone that asserting the political reality over the market reality was a road to doom. In actual fact it proved the necessity of allowing natural markets to operate and the fundamental role of freedom in human society, but it did not help to frame the proper and useful placement of market economies – it just proved that we need them.
The the later stages, as social welfare developed more fully and costs rose significantly, the market economies of the West started to run out of resources and face greater competition from the rest of the world. In response to those pressures a complex system of debt was used to replace real wealth. The political reality encouraged the markets to manufacture a debt delusion that was bound to crash when it ran out of bubbles to inflate. This happened in 2008 and the real reality, that the political reality is dependent on the market reality, came home to roost. The first response, the understandable reaction to the shock, was denial; and the remedy was to repair the debt damage in the market reality by transferring it to the political reality, by bailing out the banks.

Now we must face the fusion of our political and market realities, if we are to forge a path forward for cohesive human societies. We must face the reality that we cannot account for our social needs with the same mechanisms that are appropriate for our market economies. If we are to build sustainable market societies we must recognize the social rewards of social work alongside monetary rewards for market success. The reality is that the market economy is a smaller realm of activity than the social services realm, and the market economy simply cannot produce sufficient monetary wealth to pay for the the necessary social activity with money.
Transitioning to this fused reality is not hard, or far away. The future of the “social market economy” is the “market economy society“. A subtle but profound transition of emphasis accomplished by an equally subtle and profound change of our priorities. The market economy remains but the political reality is profoundly altered by accepting responsibility for itself and transitioning from dependent to independent.
The market economy society establishes a framework within which the market can operate without responsibility for society, because society has assumed responsibility for itself and the market operates within a space created and nurtured for it by the society. The mechanisms that create this reality are simple and universal as well as being accessible and immediately effective.
In a market economy society the monetary cost of labor is only its commercial value adding quotient. This is true because the society provides the basic services necessary to sustain a reasonable life (shelter, sustenance, transport, education, healthcare, information and the protection of the law) for free – the majority of the cost of these services is absorbed by the citizens of the society in return for the reward of living in a peaceful, free, market economy society.

This is the only desirable and feasible human society. The debt bubble has burst, the industrial growth train has run out track and steam and the elevation of social awareness is irreversible.
The looming “age of austerity” being offered up by the old disconnected realities is neither necessary nor acceptable, as we shall see. The measure of our skill as a product of Nature will be our ability to reimagein our actual reality, with clarity of practice and intention.

What could have been… UK 2010 election results

If the UK had the LIFE PR election system in place the results of last week’s voting would have mirrored the desires and intentions of the people better, created a more effective legislative body and produced stronger leadership.

Of course, the UK doesn’t even have PR let alone a LIFE PR system. This left the average citizen trying to cast a vote that covered so much ground and met so many needs that they are to be commended for having made any choice at all. Faced with trying to select an effective local representative, choose a national direction and say something to the world, all in one vote, was a mighty task indeed. In the end many voted to keep out what they didn’t want. Hardly a model of effective democracy.

In a LIFE election the citizens would be casting one vote for a representative to the UK parliament/State Assembly. They would be able to pick from the same list of candidates, irrespective of where they live in the UK, and they would be able to select an alternative/second choice should their first choice candidate fail to muster sufficient votes to meet the quota. This would free everyone to vote for whom they truly wanted to lead their country, instead of voting for someone they didn’t want, and who wasn’t going to lead their country anyway, just to keep out a representative of a party they disagreed with even more strongly.

The UK State Assembly would have a maximum of 62 seats available [population/1 million]. Just over 29 million people voted so the quota for election to a seat would have been slightly less than 500,000 votes. On the face of it that would mean that Greens, who only got 285,616 votes, would not have had a single seat – but who knows how many people across the nation might have voted for a Green candidate if they knew that their votes counted? The BNP would have got a seat even though they got none in the May election, and UKIP would have secured 2 seats.

However all of the numbers are a little suspect because there was so much tactical voting and so little opportunity for the average citizen to truly express their intentions through their vote. Given the chance to choose a candidate who truly represented their views, citizens would quite likely have picked a much broader array of representatives to head up to Westminster on their behalf. Furthermore, with a LIFE PR system everyone 16 and older would have had a vote and those caring for others would have had their charge’s vote too – enfranchising the young, the old and the disabled.

So using the voting record from a flawed election to extrapolate what would have happened with a more perfect system is fraught with difficulties and anomolies, nevertheless it is interesting to look at. If nothing else if shows that the LIFE PR system is fair, effective and representative.

We will be posting a calculator model at www.standardsoflife.com that you can use to figure out for yourself how an election near you would have turned out if you had a LIFE PR voting system – post your results and comments at Topic – Voting.

The Unified Theory of People in Action

How do you pay for a peaceful, socially secure and democratic society with a sustainable economy?

There is a blind spot at the center of modern social-economic thinking to which we are almost universally susceptible, and yet it can be quite easily observed to be false. This is an introduction to that conundrum.

We all want to live in peace, with a certain degree of prosperity. Most of us would like this to be at least inter-generationally sustainable. Our general principles of organization are also fairly commonly established, including the rule of law and the freedom to choose our governments by popular election. That’s a pretty good start, and we all pretty much share these principles.

Within this general context, we have two primary schools of thought, the Left and the Right. The Left tends to believe that the quality of any individual’s life is dependent on the quality of the life of their fellow citizens, and that that quality is achieved through a communal effort to support the basic infrastructures of society, such as public services and social security. The Right tends to believe that everyone is primarily responsible for themselves and the consequences of their actions, and that the prosperity of a society is substantially dependent on the freedom to pursue opportunity and engage in enterprise.

On these basic points each school is right. Left and Right are not in conflict as much as they think they are, they just emphasize different priorities. However at the nexus of their disagreements is a mutually held fallacy: that the “economy” can produce sufficient wealth to “pay” for the society they wish to live in. The reality, the elephant in the room holding a giant sledgehammer and standing next to the mirror that they use to sustain their mutual illusion, is that the economy does not, and cannot, produce enough wealth to pay for the society they want.

The Right believe that a comprehensive social benefit system will result in withering tax rates that will deflate the economy, and that borrowing to pay those benefits is not a viable alternative. They’re right. The Left understand that our modern social civilization depends for its peace and prosperity on a functioning social infrastructure and that poverty undermines the foundations on which we all stand. They’re right, too.

What they are both wrong about is the math. The economy, after all, is just a system of accounting that lubricates the actions of people. The wealth that can be counted in money is the value added output of commercial enterprise, it is not a measure of the total output required to enable and service the whole society.

In developed, democratic, peaceful and prosperous societies children take a long time and a lot of effort to raise and educate into functioning citizens and economic participants. During our lifetimes we need a range of services such as healthcare, transport and access to information in order to participate fully in our society, and we live for a long time passed our age of peak performance and output. In fact, in a modern society, only about one third of the population is gainfully employed in wealth creating (i.e. tax paying) activities — the rest are either young, old or disabled. Yet every citizen at every age is a consumer of, and dependent on, the services and infrastructure of the society, without correlation to their wealth creating capacity or activity at any particular stage.

The elephant in the room is this basic economic math: that we are all greater consumers of social resources than we are contributors of monetary taxes. We do not pay our parents to raise us, nor does anyone else, and nor could any society afford to pay every parent for their services, any more than any society can afford to pay everyone who cares for an elderly person. We understand this intuitively; we know that our families, our communities and our society are dependent on the unpaid contributions of many. We know that to attempt to pay everyone who helps out is a totally impractical idea.

There’s enough expense in simply building and maintaining the infrastructure of a modern society to consume most of any reasonable tax on wealth creation. The naked truth is that every society is completely dependent on the voluntary contributions of its members, in return for rewards that are not measured in monetary terms. What we call “the economy” is not the same as our society, and it only represents and accounts for a minority of all the people’s actions. The economy can never generate enough money to compensate everyone for all of their activities. No society can function without this volunteer action, and yet it is outside the system of accounting that we call our “economy”. Our society is a larger body of action than our economy, and you cannot pay for the larger out of the smaller.

And so the mirror is broken, the elephant having deployed its sledgehammer, shatters the illusions of both Left and Right. We cannot tax our way to equality any more than we can survive as a society without education, transport and healthcare. Yes: corruption, military spending and inefficiencies are terrible wastes of money, but the reality is that even if they all stopped tomorrow we still couldn’t afford to pay for all of the facilities of a functioning, prosperous, democratic society out of taxes on the demand economy. Even if our military spending would pay for universal healthcare, or quality education, or high-speed public transport — it won’t pay for all three. Modern social civilizations require a vast public infrastructure for transport, energy, information and public services, further amplified by climate mitigation needs. And if you don’t provide these facilities you can’t have peace, freedom and security to enjoy whatever prosperity you do have.

The mirages of self-funding, social democracies are often referenced, but do not withstand scrutiny. Those nationstates today that look or claim to be pulling off the trick of tax-funded, socially secure prosperity are taxing so highly that their economies are running below the necessary long-term capacity, unsustainably exploiting finite natural resources or effectively borrowing wealth from another society – all good while they last, but not sustainable. In a sustainable global economy trade must eventually be balanced and local economies substantially self-reliant.

Once the hammer has smashed the mirror, both Left and Right find themselves looking at the same dilemma: how do you fund, account for and maintain a social civilization with a sustainable economy? There are very substantial costs involved and taxes cannot generate sufficient revenues to pay for it all.

One answer is surprisingly simple, cheap and effective. It can be implemented immediately without requiring redistribution of assets and without overly disruptive changes to the basic mechanisms of administration, monetary control or enterprise. Once we accept our volunteer social membership status, the next steps fall easily onto the path in front of us.

The first step is to dedicate all income taxes exclusively to the provision of basic life-sustaining services for all citizens: basic shelters for the homeless, public canteens for the hungry, basic education, healthcare and public transport for all. You make all of these services available to any citizen, on demand at no charge.

Next, you remove any controls on the minimum compensation that anyone can pay or earn for work. Minimum wages are unnecessary because minimum life services are provided instead.

Third, you make income taxes universal and fixed to the cost of providing the services in the first step, and not to exceed a rate of 50%. This creates a cap on the maximum costs of providing the services, and defends the incentives that support a robust enterprise economy.

When implemented in today’s advanced societies and economies, these steps create positive feedback loops that result in full social development, an expansive and resilient economy with average taxation rates on income of around one third. The other activities of government can be funded using local, sales or corporate taxes.

No one gets any cash benefits, everyone is free to take responsibility for themselves and a flourishing economy supports the social fabric of democratic civilization. Not Left, not Right, just unified people in action.

(To see how this all works in more detail go to www.StandardsofLIFE.com)

Oh yes we can (afford it)!

The Economic Effects of Universal Services

In addressing the assumption that providing universal services will (unaffordably) increase the tax burden (compared to the traditional benefits system) it is worthwhile to consider the actual impact on the economy of universal services, because this will reveal that assumption to be false.

Providing universal services actually has the following effects:
– Reduced waste
– Increased efficiency
– Increased output
– Broader tax base
– Reduced unit service costs
– Reduced labor rates
– Reduced pensions burden
– Increased resource efficiency

Let’s look at each of these impacts in a little more detail so that we can understand why it is that universal services are not as unaffordable as may at first appear to be the case.

Reducing Waste
Universal services, as opposed to benefit payments, do not allow for same degree of diversion of social spending to other than intended targets, reducing the wasteful misappropriation of public resources and eliminating the budget back-fill that is inevitably required to replace diverted and wasted funding.

Increased Efficiency
Very significantly, because universal services are not means tested, the administrative overhead, compared to means tested benefits systems, is much lower. This is amplified by removing the need to police the system – an economic efficiency and a social benefit.
Because core and essential services are delivered as public services by public agencies, at least that portion of the costs that would otherwise have been absorbed by the profits of commercial providers are retained to increase the quantity or quality of services for the same budget. For instance a Community Center kitchen can deliver healthy nutrition at cost.

Increased Output
The removal of poverty and benefit traps allow all universal service recipients to work and contribute without penalty, thus increasing production using otherwise immobilized resources. (Current benefits systems effectively force recipients not to work because the marginal benefit of earning small amounts is often negative.)
Further increasing output is the increased provision of marginal services and greater availability of marginal employment opportunities resulting from the reduction in basic labor rates (see below).

Broader Tax Base
Because otherwise non-contributing resources are able to make marginal contributions to output, the monetized value of their output adds to the available income tax base (as well as wealth to the economy).

Reduced Basic Labor Rates
Universal services allow for the socialization of a significant portion of the basic labor charge, because market participants only value, in monetary terms, the marginal value of their contributions. They accept the value of the universal services as socialized income which delivers the same value to them as they would otherwise have had to demand in monetary form. This effect is most pronounced at the unskilled labor level, but continues to have some effect further up the skill ladder as well.

Reduced Unit Costs for Universal Services
The materialized cost of delivering a unit of universal services is reduced by the socialized value of labor inputs into the universal service delivery mechanisms. Because a significant portion of the labor content in universal services is more demanding of social skills, which are already often socialized (e.g. caring), the impact of reduced labor rates on the labor content of the cost profile of universal services is more marked than it is in the commercial sector, where enhanced skills always have, and will continue to, command very large premiums over basic labor rates.
Any necessary extensions of service will be absorbed by the reduction in the unit cost of delivering universal services that result from the reduced materialized cost of labor inputs, negating any need for increases in tax rates.

Reduced Pensions Burden
Pension recipients accept the value of the universal services in place of their market value without impact to their standard of living. The efficiencies of universal service delivery (see above) allow for the delta between the cost of service provision and the market value of those services to be removed from the tax burden.

Increased Resource Efficiency
The beneficial effects on resource efficiency resulting from the delivery of universal services come from three consequential outcomes:

Increased use of resource efficient mechanisms through the aggregation of demand, driven by the removal of barriers to adoption (pricing) and widespread accessibility, increases the scale, efficiency and penetration of those mechanisms, such as mass transport and efficient public housing.
The extension of manufactured goods’ useful lifetimes and significantly higher rates of reuse resulting from the wider availability, greater accessibility and low monetized costs of micro-services in local markets for repair, restoration and recovery. By reducing the cost of labor to its marginal rates, the repair of goods becomes a much more competitively priced option in the marketplace and the relative cost of material replacement is significantly elevated in comparison.
The wider availability of human energy makes it an attractive replacement for manufactured energy, reducing resource consumption.

Taken together the overall impact of universal services is to socialize some labor costs that would otherwise be monetized, and in so doing to reduce the tax burden of universal service delivery, because the tax burden is expressed in monetary terms. Consequential effects include deeper penetration of services, greater efficiency in service delivery and of resource use.

Astute fiscal observers might wonder what will happen to tax receipts if the basic rate for labor is reduced. The answer is that it will have a negligible, if any at all, impact on tax receipts because revenues from tax payers with incomes at or near today’s basic labor rates (minimum wages) are minimal, due to the current system of “allowances”. In fact the increased output resulting from the motivation of currently immobilized resources will likely result in larger increases in tax revenues than any revenues lost through the reduction of prevailing basic labor rates.

Ultimately the monetized burden (i.e. tax) on the economy of delivering universal services is likely to be similar to that of the benefits system, except with more effective outputs and substantial social and environmental advantages.

BIG problems need small solutions

Effective and successful human societies are based on trust, cooperation and contribution. The balance between trust and cooperation is the key to unlocking our contribution. The social structure must provide sufficient protection of and benefit for the individual, to balance the necessary curtailment of individual liberty in the public space within which cooperation happens.

If I was to tell you that to fix our biggest problems we need only do three things: protect individual rights, devolve political power down to our communities and guarantee everyone the bare necessities of a productive life. What would you say?

Would you say that those three things do not address climate change, immigration, food sovereignty, trade, Middle East peace or some other issue?
Would you say that these changes are impossible, or impractical?
Would you say that changing the structure is futile or irrelevant if we don’t change ourselves first?

You’d be mistaken, if you did. We are faced with a veritable bevy of very serious and very significant problems: climate change, poverty, war, nuclear proliferation, demographics, corruption, water shortages and food insecurity, to name but a few. In seeking solutions to address these problems we are easily aware that we need big changes, but we tend to slip into looking for one or two big solutions for each problem. This is our pitfall, it leads us to see solutions in competition with each other and it does not deliver results.

Big solutions to big problems are easy to describe, to capture in a soundbite and put in a manifesto, but they are not reality. The solution to hunger in Africa is not aid, the solution to climate change is not carbon sequestration nor is it a carbon tax nor any other “magic bullet”. The big news about all of the big solutions we need is that they are made up of thousands of millions of little solutions acting in concert.

The most radical principle we must adopt if we are to solve our problems is devolution: we must empower individuals, communities and affected populations of all sizes to develop the specific solutions that befit their situations. Poverty, food supply, peace and environmental balance will not be fixed from above by beneficent leaders (even if we had any). The problems are too complex and the appropriate solutions too varied by locale to be effectively articulated in a grand plan from above.

The only grand plan we need is to empower people to develop their own solutions.

Such a grand plan of devolution must build the framework that will enable a thousand million solutions. The framework requires first that we trust one another. Next we must harness the value of collective, effective and coordinated decision-making. Finally we must free ourselves to make our maximum contributions. Those are the reasons why we need a new constitution, effective democracy and universal services, and why only this approach will actually result in solutions to our big problems.

Cooperation is as simple and as complex as it looks. We cooperate personally with our family and friends, communally in our neighborhoods, regionally for our utilities, nationally for our standards and internationally for peace; and even that is only a thin slice of the total reality. The only reason to constitutionalize freedom is to enable cooperation, and that makes cooperation to constitutional corollary. We need to be able to describe and incorporate our framework for cooperation just as we describe and incorporate our freedoms and protections.

Constitutionalizing cooperation requires a rationalization of our social framework, contemporaneous with the incorporation of flexibility that acknowledges and accommodates the inevitable inaccuracy of a universal application of that rationalization. The model of multilayered representation (www.standardsoflife.org/MLR) reconciles the needs of rationalization and flexibility by providing for local variability and tempromorphism without threatening the structural integrity of the cooperation that it enables. By using anthropologia as its source, MLR’s structure is universally applicable, concurrent with its malleability to local circumstances.

Having established the basis of trust and cooperation through the instrument of a constitution, the remaining ingredient is facilitating universal contribution. Anthropology reveals a natural human inclination to make contributions, once the threats to survival have been overcome. So the first step to enabling everyone to engage in developing and enacting the many small solutions we need to our big problems, is to do what we can to annul the distractions of personal survival. This requires a social commitment by all to the provision of the bare necessities of life to all. The reorientation of our societies toward more fundamentally democratic principles must be accompanied by a revisioning of the social contract to include not only the freedom and security of members but also their basic survival needs.

Universal services are the embodiment of the social contract and are delivered to all as a right of citizenship. As the foundation stone of our society it is right and proper that our tax revenues are used first to deliver these basic services. Beyond the manifestation of principle, the delivery of universal services fosters a cornucopia of opportunity for contribution from all. The cooperation built on trust will direct contributions to develop and implement the solutions to our biggest problems at the lowest marginal cost, because the revealed market for contributions values everything, however small, but only at its marginal value-added. Every service can find its place in a marketplace relieved of the competition of survival. Transaction volumes, wealth, efficiency, resilience and innovation are all increased dramatically. So are the opportunities for unique and enhancing contributions that can improve our standard of life, open gateways to personal growth and bring fun and joy into our existences. Plainly put, there are many more activities worth doing once your food and shelter are guaranteed for life.

So I say again that there are only three things we need to change to develop the solutions to our biggest problems: adopt a constitution protecting freedom, devolve political power and deliver universal services. Three things that, for different reasons in different countries, will be strongly resisted by the rich and the powerful elites; but their resistance does not for one moment tarnish the necessity or imperative.

The scale of the challenges we face and the universal implications of failing to address those challenges points us most assuredly at the vitality and importance of coordinated, cooperative contributions to meet those challenges. The universal adoption of a universal constitution and the provision of universal services do address our problems, they are practical (if not pragmatic), they are intertwined with the opportunity for personal growth and they are absolutely, unequivocally necessary for our survival.

Green Is a Secondary Colour

Green is what we need, but we must paint with a broader palette to achieve that goal.

In the same way that the colour green is an output of mixing yellow (sunlight) and blue (water), green politics is an outcome not a cause. As Gus Speth laid out clearly in his book “The Bridge at the Edge of the World”, the environmental movement has seen itself as an input into the political process, a component of right strategy and an agitator desiring influence; rather than focusing on the desired end result, the total solution.

When we look at environmental concerns as the output, the results of political movement, we immediately understand our phraseology differently. We are forced to consider what are the inputs that will result in environmentally sustainable outcomes. In this perspective we see that achieving green goals requires a more fundamental attention to all of the inputs that drive our societies. We see that green is a secondary output resulting from the right combination of primary inputs.

The increasingly common use of the word “sustainability” betrays a movement toward consideration of the actions that must change, but we need to go further back than that. We must focus on the context within which actions are taken, on the factors that shape what actions are plausible and the intentions that proceed those actions.

In drilling back through the layers that are between the outcome and the root we soon come to realize that it is necessary to act on the causes if we are to affect the results. The roots, in this case, are the fundamental structures of our society, governance and economics. Only by addressing these root issues will we achieve balanced environmental outcomes, resulting from sustainable actions intentioned within sound social structures.

The required restructuring of our social fabrics to align ourselves to produce sustainable results will test us to the core, and this is why cohesive mutual interest must be a central feature of the changes we introduce. The global reach and indiscriminate impacts of environmental change exempts no one from its direct or consequential fallout. Concepts that drive, laud or emphasize individual survival will only result in collective failure for all. Changes that reward and reinforce social unity will help us all succeed individually.

One facet of the need for this increase in social cohesion is the now commonly acknowledged fact that remediating our energy use will have a disproportionately disadvantageous impact on the poorest members of our societies, because they already have to devote the largest portion of their resources to the basic staples of life. Even relatively minor increases in energy costs will have a substantial impact on their ability to do everything else for themselves. Directly affected are shelter and transport costs, but those have immediate secondary effects on sustenance and education. Only the provision of universal basic services can ameliorate these impacts and maintain social cohesion.

Another requirement for achieving sustainability, and a direct result of increasing energy costs, is an urgent drive for greater efficiency, primarily in shelter and transport. While private economic units can be motivated into efficiency investments through simple pricing mechanisms, public infrastructure requires intentional and proactive public investment to increase efficiency. Efficiency in transport and housing also necessarily require collaborative effort serving mass needs.

Further amplifying the need for publicly intentional intervention is the dramatically compacted timescales within which changes must be affected. Markets rely substantially on behavioral changes to redistribute resources efficiently, and human behavior is naturally inclined toward consistency and against the destabilization of change. The proactive stimulation of change ahead of lagging behavioral tendencies requires intentional intervention driven by public will in advance of market motivated reallocation. In short, by the time market forces are effective in motivating change it will be too late, we must act on what we know now about the future consequences of today’s actions if we are to act in time.

The final fundamental causal factor at the root of sustainable survival is the evident efficiency of small, local processes. Small-scale farming, energy production and microeconomic activity are fundamentally necessary features of our future because they alone can produce the sustenance, energy and wealth that is in balance with our natural environment. This requirement for local, micro-production predicates the devolution of political and social structures to empower local communities. Reinvigorating our local societies without losing the cohesive benefits of our wider national and trans-territorial infrastructures requires that we adopt multilayered representational democracies to maintain unity while we enfranchise communities.

If we are to achieve the movement of our world into alignment with our Earth we must act on the fundamental structures in the context of our societies. The provision of universal services and multilayered democracies are not merely the right things to do, they are the necessities at the heart of achieving environmental sustainability.

Green is what we need, but we must paint with a broader palette to achieve that goal. Comprehensive, fundamental changes to our democracies, social structures and economies are necessary precursors to achieving environmental balance and it is on these basic elements that we must act. Our environmental goals are going to be met by the ministries of housing, social security and healthcare along with the devolution of our politics. Paint our politics first and then the picture will be green.

Breaking the constituency link

The denunciation of a patently more democratic voting process based on its impact on a fundamentally flawed democratic structure betrays adherence to the latter.

Mr. Brown, and many others, say that they disapprove of introducing proportional representation because they believe it will break the link between an MP and their constituency. If we vote locally for a national assembly, he is right.

But the link that is broken is only broken in name, because it was broken in practice a long time ago. Our national parliament does not have the time and is not the appropriate venue for the resolution of local matters. It is a national parliament that concerns itself with national issues, and so it should.

The denunciation of a patently more democratic voting process based on its impact on a fundamentally flawed democratic structure betrays adherence to the latter. But it is hardly novel to point out that those in power are unlikely to support, or even to see, changes to the existing framework of power distribution as important or necessary.

Proportional representation is an excellent method of distributing power amongst representatives within a constituency. However if a single constituency is broken up into smaller pieces, the system falls apart. This is not a weakness of proportional representation, it is the logical result of the fundamentally flawed notion of segmented constituencies.

Improving the responsiveness of government, enhancing our democratic processes and more closely connecting the citizen to the actions of the government requires that we layer our government by constituency. We need local governments to tackle local issues and regional governments to tackle regional issues, just like we need national governments to tackle national issues. This will require national governments to give up their control and say over all issues that are not of truly national concern – this is probably a concept that hasn’t even crossed their minds.

Of course introducing proportional representation to the election of national representatives will result in a national chamber full of duly elected members who are concerned with, and were elected on, national issues. This is only a problem if the power to affect local issues is vested in the national parliament.

In reality the “constituency link” is a euphemism for

the false promise that you can elect a local MP to go to Westminster so that they can fix your local issues and represent your local perspective
the concentration of power at the national level
the further concentration of power within the national parliament to a select group of “ministers” (who I am sure have all the time in the world to devote to the matters, affairs and concerns of their local constituency)
a breeding ground for porkbarrel politics
the fundamental disenfranchisement of individual citizens because they vote locally for national representatives and end up with neither local action nor national representation
the protection of investment that “safe” constituencies provide
a system of waste that requires every MP to have two houses and travel continuously, such that they are rarely in touch with the reality of their local constituency, the broader electorate or even their own families

So Mr. Brown is right that introducing a fairer voting system will break the constituency link, but he is wrong to identify this as a problem. The problem is the lack of real democracy, and the solution is to break up the monolithic power structure of a single national parliament and devolve power down to constituencies. That will truly link the citizen with their community constituency.

Opportunity is knocking

Events have outstripped the establishment options.

78%. That’s the percentage of the electorate in the Norwich North that did not vote for the “winning” candidate in the last UK by-election.

So for every Conservative voter there are four others who don’t think that the Tories have the answers. We can do some basic maths here: the Conservatives won with 22% on a turnout of substantially less than 45%; that leaves 55% who didn’t vote at all and half of them is a little north of 27%. So if only half the people who didn’t vote, voted for an alternative… that alternative would have been the winner. Or, if only one in three non-voters voted and 10% of voters switched to the same alternative that would have been enough to win the election.

Add to that maths the fact that just under a third of all incumbent MPs will not be standing for re-election, and you have a real opportunity for real change.

Right now the economy isn’t even serving the minority, the population is aging, the country is committed to foreign wars beyond its means and the climate is heating up. None of these is addressed by the political choices on offer. Events have outstripped the establishment options.

It may be nine months premature to declare the death of Britain’s established political parties but it certainly demonstrates the opportunity. If a human baby can gestate from conception to birth in just nine months, surely a new politics can be born in the same time.

We want better. We deserve better. We can do better.

The essential dilemma of the “new left”

Capitalism and communism have failed differently but equally.

Why is it that, even when supported by a majority, the “new left” parties of today’s democracies seem so powerless and ineffective? These failings have gathered more significance now that their implications extend beyond the philosophical musings of academia to threaten the trajectory of our species.

If an effective and practical alternative to the “history ending” construct of post-Soviet capitalist democracy cannot be found, articulated and formulated… we will be “left” in the hands of fiddling tinkerers or patently failing but readily presentable nationalchismo and egocentrism that is so familiar it feels “right”.

The problem is rooted in the context of the “new left”. After the obvious failure of communism crystallized by the fall of the Berlin wall, the void in alternative thinking caused by half a century of war was deafening. The space was empty, and was promptly filled the “ideas lying around” at that time. The last two decades of the 20th century saw the sublimation of democracies into dependent clients of corporate capitalism. This context became the assumptive base on which all subsequent democratic rationales were built. Our politicians in the early 21st century grew out of this context, and inherited it as the de facto state of the world. All that remains to distinguish between today’s “new” political philosophies is whether or not to tinker with the details at the edges of the “established” wisdom. The “left” became self-described as missioned with the broadening of “opportunity” and the protection of “dignity”. The “right” became the guardians of the purity of the great manna machine that was the raison d’être of the system and without which all else was naught. And so was cast the mould from which our modern politics emerged.

The essential dilemma of this construct is that the “new left” cannot deliver on promises for change, because at its root it accepts the de facto model of democracy as a gift of capitalism. Only aspirations for a friendlier face on the head of capitalism is honestly deliverable, once you adopt capitalism (an economic, not a political, concept) as the core of your political philosophy. To offer to deliver an alternative reality from within the confines of this established hegemony is at worst bare faced lies or at best vainly naïve. Indeed a combination of those lies and thin promises are regularly offered up at election time by every shade of politician, short of the brazenly fascist. And we eat it up, at least we have until now.

At some point, one would assume, we will tire of the disrespect, the shallow illusions and the failed and broken promises. But will we do so in time? I believe we will. The percentage of the population of most democracies that are willing to suck it up one more time, to risk suffering the humiliation of disappointment garnished with a dressing of pompous ignore-ance, is waning. The number who have lost their forbearance for disrespect has climbed steadily this century, and in recent years has reached upwards of 20% of the voting constituency and a majority of the population below the median age. The time will come, and that time will come soon, when a sufficiently large majority of the voters in today’s democracies will have had enough of being lied to, had enough of going in what is obviously the wrong direction. At that time we will once again be grasping for the best ideas lying around. Without good ideas we all risk being seduced by the crude appeals of savage instincts, special natures, chosen myths and other aspects of the illusion of our disconnected selves – all of which would presage our demise and descent.

The best good ideas will not be bound by the strictures of 20th-century constraints on the limits of available models. Alternative frameworks that can actually deliver sustainable prosperity will be big ideas, they will start with what is and aspire to something completely different. A whole new framework that redraws the big picture is what will deliver the change we need.

Capitalism and communism have failed differently but equally. Not because either is without merit or devoid of place, but rather because there are only aspects of a whole. They are nascent ideas springing from the well of possibilities and were dressed in suits before they were rightfully out of diapers. A century of gestation allows us to develop a new model for our societies, our economies and our democracies that includes and values each aspect, in its proper position in the constellation of our natural natures.

The “new center” starts with the premise that the big picture needs to change. That’s what distinguishes it from both the left and the right of old politics.

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