The #1 Solution to the Economy: Make it Unprofitable

Let me start by saying that I think that any economic or political model can work well as long as it is guided by the golden rule, common-sense, compassion and tolerance. These are the underlying ideas behind the economic model that I am about to propose. It will contain a few references to the tenets and tools I have written about in previous posts. In case the reader is lost, please, feel free to review these.

The Five-Step Salary Ladder

In a just society, the concept of profit is completely banished. People are going to work for the pleasure of working and serving society.  The salary a person receives is going to be solely dependent on two factors:

1. The amount of knowledge and specialization required to do that work;
2. The amount of time the person spends periodically performing such work.

Therefore, in the Just Society, you can only earn more if either you work more or have a very specialized job. The categorization for the degree of specialization should not be a very complex one. It should follow the levels of education the job demands and could look something like the following:

1. No education required (e,g.,: public cleaning household jobs );
2. Reading and writing required ( e.g., driving and cooking jobs);
3. High school or technical specialization required (e.g.: office related jobs, crafts and technical jobs such as plumbing, mechanics, etc.);
4. University or high skills requirements (school teacher, lab assistant, factory manager, politician, etc.);
5. Specialized high-skill jobs (e.g.: biodiversity consultant, socio-political analyst, rocket scientist);

You can see that the qualifications are in-line with the amount of education one gets. It is also in-line with the amount of knowledge a job requires in order to be performed. Being the academic that I am, it is obvious I love this model, since I would be making the highest level salary, the highest in the market, that is, if I find a position! :)

This system not only guarantees a fair salary for everyone, but it also removes the personal greed and work exploitation since it won't lead to higher income to the upper level management to detriment of the uneducated labor class.

You may ask yourself: what will motivate people to go to work, if they are not going to make a lot of money? Well, there is indeed a concern that society production may come to a stall because of this restriction of the amount of money one can make in a job. Besides, if they can have their basic rights assured by the government, why should they care about working at all? Well, for one, the government will be watching you, if you can work and are not, you are out of society. Moreover, market competition is still out there. The person who does the best service will still be the one most requested to do a certain job an therefore be able to maintain a high level pay for longer periods of time. Competition itself is a motivator for doing good work and serving well others.
 
Moreover, there are techniques that can be used to mitigate such restriction on profit. For example, the employee-of-the-month approach used by many companies nowadays could be applied to all kinds of jobs. It could grant periodic bonuses to those employees that were elected by others as the most helpful and productive. The good part about this model is that in order to make more money, you need to be more educated and a better worker. This direct link between learning more and earning more is very important for the generation of a society of educated citizens.

Another motivator is that, if there are less working positions than people willing to work on that position, the position, the work hours get split among qualified unemployed candidates until everyone can work at least a few hours a week. While this might lead to a management nightmare, which might be overcome using technology, it would let everyone work their share, contribute to society, have their income and still have more free time. What is not to like about that?

Then you ask: what if there are jobs that no one wants to work on, like banking or financial management for example? Well, in these cases, the job is going to a community service pool. Citizens will be randomly pulled to perform these duties until their annual community service quota is filled. The amount of quota for each individual is computed using the ratio between the amount of work hours required to complete all the available and undesired jobs in the pool and the amount of citizens capable of completing that job. A citizen cannot be called to lecture a class in micro-biology unless he has the knowledge to do so. In extreme scarcity cases, training and education could be part of the hiring process.

What about political jobs? Who is going to want them anyway? They are probably not going to be the best paying jobs, because they don't require a lot of expertise, and they are going to demand a lot of work to understand the public demands, and make public money work in the right direction. Well, the beauty of this model is that people are going to work in the areas that are the most pleasurable for them. If you are doing a job because of the money you make, you should probably not be in that job. People should work on a job they like. And this is actually a good thing. This will make people who really want to be with people, and communicate and, help others to be the politicians, the ones managing society. Can you imagine a world where all the politicians are passionately working to serve their communities? That would be a dream come true, wouldn't it?

A Universal Public Service System

Dealing with individual salaries is a tiny bit and a somewhat easy to handle  part of the whole economic process. But what about private companies? How are their profit going to be controlled? Yes. You, the reader, is right again. I was procrastinating on that topic so as not to scare you and other readers right in the first paragraph of this post. However, I feel that now may be the right time do it. :) There will be no for-profit private companies! Andcall companies will be publibly monitored. In other words, all companies will become public nonprofits. And before you say I am crazy, please, think with me for a moment. What do private or public companies do? They provide a service to society. A company should not  and will not be able to do any more than that in a Just society. For example, they will not make their CEOs filthy rich because of the salary ladder imposed above. Every business, that is, a business that involves interaction between more than one person is a social service. Thus, it should not be a minoriry enrichment machine, but rather a society enrichment one.

This simple claim has an enormous, and positive, repercussion in the way we do business. It implies that, whether you are mowing your neighbor's lawn, selling bread, or managing a global IT company, your business will be public an monitored by a public System for Accountability Management (SAM, mentioned in a previous post). Every business will be potentially monitored and therefore be under the scrutiny of the public eye.

And what happens to a company's profit? Let us say a company makes more money than the amount necessary to maintain its infrastructure and pay its employees (whose salary are now fixed based on the above mentioned salary categorization above)? Where does the rest of the money go? There are a few possible destinations for this leftover:

1. The money is invested in new infrastructure to expand the amount and quality of the services provided by the company or reduce the cost of the service or product provided. 
2. If that is not done, then the money goes to SARA and is invested in public welfare according to the Just Society tenets.

The pressure in the workspace is not removed but replaced by a healthier one, the right one: to do the best job possible as efficiently as possible so as to provide the best service to everyone. Therefore, you might still have your manager breathing on your neck with this kind of system unfortunately. What can I say, nothing is perfect. However, at least now your manager will be motivated by the best of intentions.

A New Age of Social Consciousness

With this system implemented, the veil of institutional profit is removed and personal greed is uprooted from the socio-economic system. The system now works with the sole purpose of better providing services to citizens. People will be motivated to do better, to serve better and to be recognized for that. It sounds more of an oneiric economic system than anything else...and it probably is. Well, I really wanted to finish this post with a positive attitude towards my proposed economic model, but that would be too hypocritical of my part.

The fact is that if people are not willing to think of society as a group system designed to help one another, it really does not matter what kind of socio-politic-economic model one uses or proposes. People will always find loopholes and other ways to game the system and make it suit their egotistic self-serving purposes.

Therefore, in a sense, this post and many others preceding this one are useless if people are not willing to change their mentality towards helping one another. Whether this change is possible or not is a matter of faith. It is about believing humans want to fight their internal biological, survivalist or whatever-else forces that compel them to acting to their sole benefit. Are they willing to share their bread? Are they willing to lend their hand? Are they willing to sacrifice themselves in favor of others. Are they willing to put up with suffering so that others suffer less?

The answer to all of these crucial question is, from my view, at the present moment, a resounding no. No, because most people don't even think about these things, even after thousands of years of societal interaction. No, because I don't see a trend that this mentality is changing.

Few are the people who actually care about the people who they don't know, but who they know are in need for help. Human rights might seem to have evolved in some parts of the world, but at the cost of the exploitation and lack of human rights in other areas. Some countries may have become more civilized, but others are going through ever increasing revolutions, famine, plagues and public discontent. These countries are in two different sides of the coin. And regardless of how alike or different they may be at any point in history, the average result always point to the same idea: that the human behavior is ruled by the need for self-preservation. Self-preservation over social-preservation. There has never been a battle between these too, the former has always won.

Denying the prevalence of self-preservation over social preservation is denying our own nature. Accepting it and learning to deal with it is the path to growth and to building a better society. Whether the ideas proposed in this post are capable of being the solution to such a behavior is an open question. I will leave it to you, the reader to analyse these ideas figure out the correct answer to that.