Modern Tools for a Just Society

To reduce the amount of bureaucracy and human error, the management of the basic services provided to citizens in a Just Society needs to heavily rely on technology in order to guarantee the fair distribution of resources and provision of services to all citizens. A few of the tools that are going to be used in this new society are described in this post. Please, note how these tools are made generic enough so that they can be applied to a society in practically any state or federation.

The Big Brother: Digitalization and Public Monitoring

Whenever you are dealing with a messy situation, the first step is always to clean up and organize things so you can better understand what is going on. The first step towards revolutionizing the economy is digitizing every single transaction in society and make all of them globally accessible in a partially restricted manner. This is going to be done using what I like to call the System for Accountability Management (SAM). Whatever is related to the economy must be processed, logged and backed up by this computer system.

The digitization process will lead to a consistent history of the economy. It will help us do a post-analysis on the causes and effects of certain economic events from a micro and macroscopic scale. Citizens could also benefit from that, for this would help them better monitor their finances related to the  many interactions with the rest of the economy and monitor how politicians are spending money on their community. Therefore, SAM is not a bad guy, but is here to help everyone. It is a big brother, but a big brother that will protect everyone and keep them in line.

But this is really not a novel idea. This has already going on to a greater extent. Governments have websites to present reports and data on their spending. Nevertheless, most of the minute details of each individual service is still kept out of the public eyes. And that is where corruption creeps into the public machine. In a new economic society, every single cent that is spent in public affairs must be properly reported and logged in a digital system and made public for anyone to see. This will allow anyone in society to monitor the system and detect potential frauds by societal management.

One concern is obvious in this case, which is the privacy of the parties involved in each of the transactions being monitored. To protect privacy, the personal information (e.g., personal IDs) associated with the ones involved in the provision of public service should only be revealed privately for auditors in case of suspicion of fraudulent behavior.

SAM will not only monitor how money is spent on the provision of public services. It will also keep track of citizens contribution while performing societal jobs. If you steal, bribe, or commit any kind of misbehavior, you are going to get caught. On the other hand, if one works extra hard or contribute more than what is expected, this also goes on your file. And if you are on a political position, guess what happens? As a public servant, your professional profile becomes public for everyone to check it out during election times. And of course, records cannot be deleted, only mended with rectifying notes. This system will not only keep politicians on their leash, but will keep the leash on citizens' hand. It will also enable to help police and health managers identify citizens that have problems and may need social assistance.

Signature of Universal Effect

Every citizen within the society is going to have a unique ID that will allow them to perform all of society associated tasks. Let us call the Signature of Universal Effect (SUE). Sorry, but I am in the acronym-creating mood today. A SUE is directly associated with a DNA sample taken after the birth of each individual. A unique numerical representation of the DNA (a hash code) is generated using a special mathematical function (hash function). This number is then associated with an ID number that is given to the citizen. If an ID is lost, another can be retrieved through a DNA sample. If the DNA sample generated the same hash code, a new ID is given to the citizen. If not, whatever ID was associated with the generated hash code gets updated to a new one and the old one gets black listed. If the hash code is not identified, that is bad. It means the citizen was not registered yet.

Although the system would still allow for identity theft, it guarantees the person is who (s)he person claims to be...unless there are two people with the same DNA, which should only happen in the case of identical twins. And even in that case, this may not be a problem over time. For these special cases, one base hash function is used for one twin and a backup secondary hash functions are used for the other(s). Or perhaps a simple permanent and well-hidden body mark could be made on the twins individuals to identify which key they are associated with.

If the reader thinks that the DNA based approach is not enough, for it does not cover well enough the twins case or is too bodily intrusive and easily corruptible, there is still another possibility, which could be used together with the DNA id. It is what I like to call the brain ID. The idea is to use the anatomy of the surface of the brain to identify us as individuals, much like fingerprints. Since the brain develops its shape as each person develops their own personal experiences, it is expected that every single person will have brains anatomically different, even twins.  This will guarantee a unique identification mechanism for the fringe cases the DNA identification cannot cover. The only flaw with the brain ID is that, since the brain changes anatomically as time passes, monitoring of such changes must be made constantly as to guarantee the proper identification of the individual over time. This would require periodic scans for each of these special-case individuals. Because this might end up being costly, the brain ID better be used only to resolve cases that the DNA Id can't.

While this set of approaches to unique identification is not perfect, they provide a very reliable identification system that prevents long term identity theft. And whenever you need her, SUE will be there so you can know who to sue. :)

It's Just Money: A Global Measure for Resources and Production

From my view, the main issue with a monetary system is on what to base its value upon. A good idea is to have its value based on a non-perishable resource whose production process value is well defined and stable, such as gold. This has been used in the past, but has been replaced in part by the use of the dollar for similar reasons (and other reasons we don't want to know about).

The main problem is that even these are all affected by fluctuations in their associated markets. There is really no perfect solution to it. Therefore, I would like to propose my own base resource for fixing the monetary system in a Just Society. I am going to use a more ordinary resource that is accessible worldwide. I am talking about a healthy and universal meal (HUM$). Specifically, one out of the three meals one needs to have in order to sustain his/her body on a 2000 calorie diet.

What kind of food composes this meal may vary greatly from place to place, but the important part is that it is healthy. Therefore, it is based not only on one resource, but on a multitude of resources. Because of that, the meal can also adjust itself to the fluctuations of prices by using different ingredients depending on their scarcity or abundance. The important concept to take, however, is that, the value of every resource is based upon the value of a healthy meal and that the meal always provide the same amount of nutrients and energy to individuals.

Let us put the HUM currency to use now with an example. Let us say you have a deal to mow Miss McGrath’s lawn, a senior neighbor of yours. How much should you charge for it? We could think the value would be based only on the amount of calories your body has spent to perform the task. Then we could compute the average amount of calories in a healthy meal and then know exactly how much we should charge for completing such a task. Well, if you actually could know how many calories you have spent, then this would be a piece of cake. However, appealing as this methodical approach to computing the price of tasks may seem, it is far too simplistic to solve the multitude of situations that happen in real life.

The price of an activity includes not only the calorie factor, but also the price to be willing to perform the task. Some people may think that mowing the lawn is more of a burden than others. Hence, they are willing to pay more than the amount of calories necessary to do the activity because they dislike doing it so much. Moreover, you may spend a lot of calories mowing the lawn, but still end up with a terrible result because you just don't know how to do it. On the other hand, your other neighbor, Brett, may be a skilled lawn mower and spends much less calories while doing a much better job. Brett also has the latest lawn mower model which is easier to use and almost noiseless, thus making the lawn mowing experience much more pleasant for Miss McGrath. The reader can now see that the value of mowed lawn can vary depending on the type and quality of the service provided. Therefore, there is a lot of subjectivity involved in giving a price to an activity or product, which is to be expected. That is, in part, what moves the economy.

The important point to take, however, is that, whatever activity you do, you would have a very good measure of how much it would cost. Continuing with the example above, if you mow a neighbor's lawn for HUM$ 5.00 (5 healthy and universal meals), you know that by mowing one lawn everyday you would be able to support yourself reasonably well for a day and still have some leftover to use for something else to avoid working on weekends.

The beauty of this model is that it is common and accessible to everyone. It is also not attached to any specific resource, but rather to whatever resource is available to provide a healthy meal, which makes it a much more stable unit of measure, since it is the average of the value of multiple resources. It is also nation agnostic, that is, independent of a specific nation's economy health.

But how do we transition to this monetary unit? Well, we can come up with conversion units for each nation's currency based on the cost of  resources that are locally available and  necessary to produce a healthy meal.

But who picks what constitutes a healthy meal? Well, definitely not politicians or economists. Rather doctors and nutritionists who are hopefully more akin to the idea of keeping citizens healthy.

This healthy meal monetary unit will be the basis for a new economic model which will be described in a post to follow.

The Tax that Returns to Everyone

It is a fact: governments, people, or any other institution for that matter, need resources in order to serve society and accomplish whatever goals they set upon themselves.

Let us focus on governments for a moment, since they are at the heart, if not the heart itself, of a stable and healthy society. The government is responsible for ensuring the central tenets of a Just Society are properly applied to every citizen.

And that is where a System for Allocation of Resources and Amenities (SARA) comes into play.  This system will help automate the process of resource distribution across all the spheres of society. Together with SAM, SARA will help the government collect and allocate resources so that these are used to ensure the application of the Just Society core tenets.

SARA is going to contain algorithms that will help allocate the available resources to guarantee that the rights for all citizens are followed. The allocation of these resources cannot be fiddled with by government agents. If the SARA says a billion HUMs (remember, healthy and universal meals) need to be allocated in order to guarantee housing for all citizens, that is what has to be spent on that area. However, how that amount of resources is going to be spent is up to the governments agents who are in power. Please, also notice that the amount of resources is also distributed from the federal to the state and community levels by SARA depending on factors such as population, land area and others.

The main purpose of SARA is to guarantee that all citizens have their basic rights assured. And sometimes that even may require increasing the amount each citizen contributes to society (tax increase! Oh, no...).

Well, an important point to make is that, since every citizen needs to contribute a certain amount of the resources they make to society, every citizen is guaranteed that they will have as much of the basic resources as any anyone else. Please, let me give an example.

Let us say a poor citizen makes only HUM$400.00 a month. However, every citizen needs to give in HUM$1000.00 a month to SARA. What is this citizen supposed to do? Well, his/her entire income is going to SARA! Isn't that awesome! :) Talk about taxing citizens. But, hold on a minute, that is not the entire story. Let me explain.

Because his/her source of income is smaller than the minimum amount estimated by SARA necessary for a citizen to support  oneself, this citizen will receive from SARA extra credit to guarantee him/her access to potable water, food, shelter, sanitation, health treatment, safety, energy, work and leisure. Some of these services will be free of charge (e.g., public leisurely events), others won't. Therefore, in the end, SARA may even return to that citizen more than what (s)he has contributed, say HUM$700.00. And the idea behind this system is that, at the end of the month, every one that is part of society has enough money to live a decent life style that complies with the Just Society tenets as much as possible.

This sounds a lot like the idea of a minimum wage. The difference is that now the calculation involves all the necessary factors required to provide citizens with a good quality of life. Additionally, this contribution and reimbursement process is going to be somewhat seamless for citizens since all the processing takes place before any credit is received by them at the beginning of each month.

The catch of this system is that SARA is obviously going to detect which citizen are being unable to fully support themselves. Therefore, these citizens need to be more closely monitored by social agents, so that they can provide the appropriate help in order for them to become fully socially productive as well as self-supporting. And this is an idea that no everyone may like, once again, because of the Big Brotherish feel to it. I would argue, once again, that the intent of SARA is only that, as a society we should help each other, so all of us can work together to improve our chances of survival and quality of life.

The computation and redistribution of resoruces is a task that is much easier said than done. A simple example that exemplify the complication of such computations is the fact that people live and work in places whose distance differ. How is SARA going to compute how much money is necessary for one to spend on transportation? What if someone has a disease that requires special more expensive diet? Well, all of these factors could serve as input to SARA's credit distribution algorithm and make the minimum wage a custom one depending on each others situation. I mean, the same adaptation already takes place in tax return nowadays. I am sure adaptive Artificial Intelligence algorithms would have to be applied in order to adjust to the current global economic state. Moreover, SARA would have to be trained very well using simulation before it was actually be put to use.

There is one last idea I need to mention about SARA. Part of it is going to be controlled by governing parties. SARA allocates resources at a higher level, but the minute conversion of resources into services that benefits people would have to be done by elected officials. This guarantees that democratic process is still kept intact and alive. Citizens can elect candidates who they think are going to better put the credits to work in a way that most pleases them. An interesting consequence of this is that all elected officials would now have to master the use of SARA's system. Yes, they would have to know office, excel and SARA. :)

In summary, SARA can be understood as a larger and more powerful version of the U.S.A.'s Internal Revenue Service (IRS). It will put all resources in a single big heap and then distribute them in a fairly manner to guarantee all citizens have their rights guaranteed.

Reader, Are You Still There?

Yes, this was indeed too much for a single blog post, but at least I have covered all the ideas for societal tools I have been thinking (so far...). Let us end it here. I will continue providing more details on the inner working of the Just Society in the coming posts.