What is the Purpose of a National Economy

What is the Purpose of a National Economy?

Introduction

Now this is a BIG question that is tied into (at least, to my mind) to the even BIGGER question: What is the Purpose of Life?

Before we look at that, let’s try to enunciate what we most commonly think of as the purposes of a national economy. They are to provide: a) for the defence of the nation-state, b) for the health and education of its inhabitants, c) for the edification, entertainment and happiness of its citizens and d) for the furtherance of the nation-state in its endless competition with other nation-states.

Now these goals are not universally held to be true in all nations but even in those that are governed by dictators they tend to pay lip-service to the middle two of these goals. As George Orwell informed us in 1984, the bigger the lie, the easier it is to believe. But for the purposes of this essay, let us assume they are an acceptable set of answers.

When I was a child of about 10 (circa the early 1960s), I was impressed by the vision of a future (circa the 21^st Century) that would allow people to work 12 hours a week and still enjoy a rich lifestyle. For a kid laboring in a private boarding school where the teachers were called Masters and they still caned and strapped their students, this sounded marvelous to me. A future filled with time to play, amazing!

Alas, it was too good to be true. But wait, why is it too good to be true? We have robots building cars, we have labour saving devices in the home, we have satellites in geo-synchronous orbit, we have space travel and space stations, we have universal, ‘free’ and instant communication (the Internet), we have clones, we have heart transplants, we have quantum teleportation, we have… all the things that were first speculated upon by science and science fiction writers in the 50s and 60s and yet everyone I know in 2005 is working incredible hours and not really getting any further ahead. Huh? What’s with that?

On Golden Lake

A few years ago, my family and I were at Red Pine Camp on Golden Lake. It was one of those fantastic Ontario summer days—the temperature was perfect, the humidity low and a huge weather front had arrived from 2,000 kilometres of prairie lands to the west of us.

I sat with my wife, Dawn on a high bluff overlooking the Lake—the sunlight reflecting off the surface of Golden Lake was indeed golden. The light patterns on the Lake were complex as the winds created wave forms that were endless in their variety. Hours passed, an entire day was spent watching this stupendous display of natural beauty.

During that time, I thought that it was highly probable that men and women had been coming to this particular bluff and enjoying this spectacle for at least the last 30,000 years. And that led me to think that for most of those generations (before the coming of the White Man), they had had enough time to actually enjoy it. I read that the average work week for a native Indian male in North America before the current era was about 12 hours a week—during which they were able to hunt enough game and provide their families with the necessities of life. The rest of the time, they could indulge themselves in: games, competitions, smoking unadulterated tobacco, communing with their gods, making love and war, playing with their children, trekking, telling stories, chewing peyote buttons, observing the natural world, perfecting their arts, teaching their kids, etc.

I also had time to reflect on a conversation I had with a worker at a resort in Jamaica some time earlier. He was responsible for towels at this particular resort—he managed the inventory of beach towels; he made sure that only resort patrons got them and he collected them from the beach after their use.

I got to know him a bit while I was staying at the resort and one day he asked me: “Mr. Firestone, who has the better life? You or me? I work 25 hours a week; I do a fine job, my boss likes me and I meet nice people. I get good tips and I still have time to smoke the Ganja, listen to music and make love to my woman. How many hours a week do you work?”

You have to ask yourself the question, if we accept the four purposes of our national economy as described above, how come it isn’t producing these kinds of results?

Socialization of Risk

In many developed nations, with the significant exception of the U.S., we socialize the risk of the health of the population—i.e., we provide national medical care for all citizens. Now we know that there are something like 45 million Americans who do not have any health coverage and, for many of them, getting sick means financial ruin and a much higher risk of death or impairment because they can not afford treatment or the most advanced treatment.

There is no nation on the planet that has ever held the power of the U.S. The U.S. is exporting its value system to every corner of the globe either through its legions of trans-national corporations, its cultural hegemony or its mighty armies.

One can not ignore the national priorities of a country like the United States because they set the de facto standard for the rest of the world.

Ask yourself the question: ‘If the U.S. decided to go to a six day work week (God forbid), what would your leaders do?”

In a relatively powerless nation-state like Canada, we would be sunk. A few years ago, one of Ottawa’s great companies (Newbridge, now owned by Alcatel) lost more than 10% of its value overnight because they dared to close on a national holiday in Canada when the U.S. was still at work. A few U.S. analysts tried to call the PR department to get an answer to some trivial question and when they couldn’t get an instant response, well, rumors started swirling around that Newbridge had gone out of business and then the rush was on to dump the stock. Now major publicly-traded companies in Canada have to keep a skeleton staff on at all times when the U.S. is at work lest it happen to them and, presto, they are forced to sell out to a larger competitor.

Socialization of Leisure

Now the Europeans have tried to take a middle path and, certainly, they have had more success than Canada could ever have in terms of pursuing their own independent policies* with regard to working hours and working conditions. France is famous for shutting down every August and German spa resorts are world-class; they know how to pamper the body.

(* Mind you, this has never stopped U.S.-based fund managers from constantly criticizing Euros for their ‘lazy’ ways despite the fact that the Euro zone has some of the highest productivity economies anywhere. It is my experience that the U.S. has this peculiar notion that unless you’re an American, you’re a dunce. I once dated a girl from NYC, a producer for a major television network, who, after finding out I was a Canadian, started talking s l o w e r to me. This occurred after a few dates and presumably finding out that I wasn’t a moron. I thought to myself: “Did my IQ suddenly drop or did she just find out I was a Canadian?”)

The Euros laugh at North Americans; they call us the ‘Work/Pajama People’. We work all day to come home at night to get immediately into our PJs so we can get to bed so we can get up the next day to do it all over again. Social life? Fun? Hobbies? Art? Play? Being with our Kids? Lifetime Learning? Hanging Out? Other interests? Extended Family? Bosom Buddies? Are you kidding, who has time for any of that?

It seems clear to me that there is no way we could ever have a national economy (in Canada and maybe everywhere) that truly puts the interests of its people first without first having an international agreement to that effect. It would be like the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine of the Cold War only it would apply to working hours and conditions—“I (name of country goes here) promise not to work myself and my co-workers to death trying to out compete and out do and out sell you if you (aka the United States of America) promise not to do the same to me.” The only difference this time would be that the doctrine would revolve around a calculus of life instead of the Strangelovian calculus of death that haunted my early childhood and all those who are middle aged today*. Hmm, that sounds somehow right to me.

(* We practiced preparing for nuclear Armageddon in the basement of our school—we were told to crouch down and put our heads between our legs. I remember hearing the wail of the early warning sirens, which were tied into NORAD, as these were tested. We would get 20 minutes warning of a nuclear attack. Plus we regularly got updates from the Doomsday Clock. Scientists set the hands on the clock—the closer to 11 it was, the higher the likelihood of nuclear war. The futility of it all, the expense, the never ending stupidity of all humans, it just boggles the mind.)

At its most primal, the urge to work ourselves to death doesn’t just come from our avarice to buy more stuff. It derives from a deep seated fear that if we don’t, our competitors will eat our lunch. If we don’t work hard, our boss will fire us, our chief competitor will steal our clients, our city and our country will fall behind other nations that we compete with, we will all lose our jobs because there are others out there willing to work even harder than we do and for less money, we won’t be able to provide all the necessities of life and educational opportunities for our children, we won’t be able to pay our bills, our spouses will leave us, …

Think about it for a minute—our primary motivations are greed and fear. And these are hugely powerful forces when it comes to humans. Is this the right way to run our lives—living in fear that we are going to get beaten out and greedy for everything we can grab lest one day we don’t have enough?

Standards

National or international standards have always made us wealthier. What’s the purpose of having a fax machine if every fax machine has its own standard and one machine can’t talk to another? What if all the fax machines in your city could talk to each other but not to one in Toronto? What if they could all talk to each other in every city in your nation-state but nowhere else?

Most of us have no idea how important these agreements are—we have standards that affect nearly every part of our global economy: we agree on the time of day (don’t laugh; it wasn’t that long ago, before the acceptance of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), that scheduling am appointment with someone was subject to a great deal of clarification as to which time you were using); the calendar, voltage, spelling, driving (right handed or left handed), signalization (red for stop, green for go), table heights, measurement (length of a centimetre, etc.), temperature scales, operating systems, counter heights, work week, right handed screws, protocols for the telephone, television, fax, tape deck, VCR, IP (Internet Protocol), Browser, Email, DVDs, secure e-documents (basically, by default, Adobe PDFs), right click, left click and so on. English has become the international standard for the Internet, for technology, for business, for politics. Think about the economic advantages that derive from having one common language that everyone speaks. The alternative is Babel and we know what became of them…they couldn’t work together as a team and teamwork is perhaps uniquely important to the survival of the human species.

We might not like some of the standards that we have adopted but their economic benefits are enormous.

Now what if we agreed on a new international standard that people should only work 12 hours a week? Would that be possible to do? No, probably not but it might be possible to, say:

Agree on 12 days a year that would be set aside as universal, internationally sanctioned holiday days—one a month.

That would allow people to have one three day weekend per month and it would be a start in a new direction. Is it possible that better rested people might be more creative and more productive? It certainly is possible and would be worth finding out.

I know that I can not take any time off; I feel guilty if I do. Work ethic is so deeply ingrained in me that if I try to take a day off when other people are working, I feel lousy. I am sure that I am not alone in this—I need Big Brother to impose time off and make it a social goal, then I am fine with it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if one of our ‘leaders’ was worried about something other than, say, Bill Clinton’s ‘love’ life? That debate practically monopolized the U.S. Congress for two years. The national dialogue in most countries, it seems to me, is incredibly picayune. No one seems to talk much about issues that would really mean something to their citizens. What are we afraid of?

Why couldn’t our leaders simply agree to add the 12 new international holiday days to whatever national holidays they already have in their countries whether that is 6, 8, 10 or whatever number of days. Imagine 12 internationally recognized holiday days where everyone got to rest and, maybe, the planet got to rest too. Turn stuff off for 12 days each year. And while we’re are at it, turn off all the outdoor city lights too so our kids can see the night sky. God knows ‘Gaia’ (Mother Earth) needs a break from human activity.

The Purpose of Life

I wish I knew what the answer to this question is. The framers of the U.S. Constitution thought it was: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. In Canada, our philosophy is based on: Peace, Order and Good Government.

As a young man, I lived in Oz for seven years and I thought that the purpose of life then was sailing. (This was later confirmed for me when then Prime Minister, Bob Hawke, declared an impromptu national holiday in Australia the day after Alan Bond’s yacht wrestled the America’s Cup away from the damn Yankees, after more than 120 years of U.S. domination of the sport).

When I was a kid, I felt sure the purpose in life was to advance technology so we could go flying around the Solar System and then the Galaxy. Immediately after this phase, I felt really sure that the purpose in life was girls.

So what is the purpose of life? Maybe if we understood it better we might also find the answer to what we should be aiming to do with our national economies too. If the purpose of life is to sit on the beach and contemplate nature then perhaps we should only be doing just enough with our national economies to keep ourselves fed.

If we decided this was the right path, then we would need international agreement (an impossibility I realize) to implement a radical change like this. You can’t have one nation working feverishly piling up wealth, technology and weapons while others made up of slackers are contemplating the Tao because, if there is any one lesson that history shows us, is that nations and peoples that don’t keep up with their competitors, well, they simply cease to exist. So you need agreement before any one nation-state could even consider re-jigging national priorities to, say, give people more family time*.

(* International agreement is a practical impossibility; you can’t even get national agreement on anything like this. Look at what happened to the national consensus and provincial consensus in Canada concerning Sunday shopping. Whether you believe in a Sabbath day or not, Sunday was the day of rest by national consensus in Canada. Families spent time together because, in a way, they were forced to. Commercial interests pressed hard for decades to make Sunday just another shopping day, like any other. They had logical arguments on their side like: not everyone recognizes Sunday as a Sabbath day or some shops in designated tourist areas were allowed to be open while others a few metres away were not allowed to.

They also put forward plausible sounding arguments like: “Shouldn’t people be allowed to choose what they want to do and when they want to do it? People can always choose not to shop on Sunday but why should they take away the rights of others to shop if they want to.” The result of these campaigns is that Sunday shopping is now allowed practically everywhere in Canada.

It has proven to be disastrous, in my view. Now every day is just like every other day. Nothing is special anymore. There is no rest day. My youngest son, Matthew, works in a local retail store and they all are required to take shifts whenever management requires them to; unwillingness to take their turn may result in dismissal.

So if we can not come to agreement about what purposes the national economy should be put to and if we do not then socialize these goals by agreement and by implementing these agreement through standards, then they aren’t going to happen and the whole debate is just stale air coming out of our mouths anyway.)

Now if you examine the geological record, you can see the evidence of mass extinctions and selective extinctions. Mass extinctions seem to have occurred when external events like a comet impacting the earth happened. Selective extinctions are harder to explain but in all probability, those species disappeared because they could not adapt to new circumstances in their environment or because of the rise of new competitors that literally either ate their lunch or ate them for lunch.

It seems the height of hubris to think that this cannot happen to humans; in fact, it seems all too likely.

In the case of extinctions, the biological slate is being cleaned—and biological room is being made for other life forms to arise. The convenient extinction of the dinosaurs almost certainly made room for the rise of mammals and humanity with it too.

Arthur C. Clarke recognized this possibility in one of his early works Childhood’s End, where humanity perished in the process of giving rise to its successors. (Interestingly, he also predicted in this novel (in 1953, no less) that long distance would be at an end as of December 31^st, 1999. The Internet arrived just in time to see Mr. Clarke’s prediction come true.)

If all the works of humans must one day perish, what’s the point*? Maybe smoking Ganja and listening to music is the right path after all.

(* Existentialists embrace a philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe. They regard human existence as unexplainable and stress freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one’s acts.** This seems to neatly get around the need to explain things like: how did life begin? But if human consciousness, ‘I think therefore I am’, is unique, or at least, a very special event and not plentiful in the Universe, then it seems to me that we are here to ask the hard questions and not to embrace a philosophy, that even though it does have a moral underpinning, it refuses to go beyond a ‘rose is a rose’ explanation of the wonders on the unimaginably large and unimaginably old space we experience around us. Humans seem to need absolutes to tell right from wrong—everything can’t be relative; everything can’t be ‘Beautiful in its Own Way’ as a syrupy old song once crooned… There is too much evil in the world for that to be true.

But somehow I don’t think life is really like that. Humans have an innate desire to create new things and manipulate their environment. Our brains have grown so enormous that the only limit on their development is the diameter of the birth canal. There must be a point to it.

We have opposable thumbs that are just perfect for gripping tools. Tools and brains, brains and tools. That is a recipe for hard work—I realize it is a circular argument; we have big brains and tool using digits so we must be meant to use them and we have big brains and tool using digits because we have used them.

Life is a self organizing and powerful force. If you have ever been present when someone dies, you would realize how precious it is and how fiercely it is surrendered.

There are many unanswered BIG questions—what created the Universe, how did life begin, how do different species actually arise? No matter how hard we think about it, no one can truly understand the meaning of a Universe that is 15 billion years old. Can you imagine, for a minute, what it would be like to witness 1,642 billion sunrises and sunsets (the approximate age of our Solar System is 4 and ½ billion years)?

No matter how hard we try, no one can really grasp the idea that there was NOTHING before the Big Bang and that the Universe was created at that moment and the enormous energies unleashed at that moment in time were conjured up from the nothingness of nothing; not even the background noise of space since space and time are linked and without time (which began at the moment of the Big Bang), there can be no space. Huh?

No one really understands how you mix a bunch of chemicals and energy in a Petrie dish and, voila, you get self-replicating DNA*. No one can really explain how you breed generation after generation of cats and, somehow, through speciation, you get a dog. Sure, we understand that longer necked giraffes had a competitive advantage over their shorter necked cousins, so now all we see are the longer necked ones. I get that. But no matter how many times we breed giraffes, we aren’t ever going to produce a zebra.

(* In Bill Bryson’s excellent book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, he notes that in order to create proteins, you need to assemble amino acids (the building blocks of life) in a precise order. To produce collagen, a common protein, you require a 1,055 sequence molecule. The chance of this happening randomly is vanishingly small. For a protein with a more modest 200 sequence, the probability of this happening by itself is 1 in 10²⁶⁰, Bryson calculates (p. 288). That is a larger number than all the atoms in the Universe. Obviously, science has a great deal more explaining to do to solve the mystery of how life began. Wouldn’t it be remarkable if science found the answer—it is bound to be wonderful because it is so improbable.)

Speciation has been defined as occurring when isolated groups from a single species develop along differing evolutionary paths until finally they can no longer interbreed. This seems much too limited a theory to account for the incredible biological diversity we see around us and that has taken place on earth over geologic time.

And random mutation isn’t the answer either since an entire population needs to be created simultaneously so they can breed successfully.

Life is stubborn and I suspect that it could be quite widespread. Intelligent life might be much rarer. Exogenesis seems as likely a vector for the start of life on earth as anything else that I have read—for example, rocks have traveled from Mars to the Earth and, less frequently, from the Earth to Mars. Natural forces such as asteroid or comet impacts have thrown Mars rocks into orbit which have later intersected with Earth’s orbit and fallen to the surface. If there was life on Mars at one time, it’s already here in all probability—having hitched a ride on space debris.

I think we have little to fear from space borne plagues that we haven’t already seen at one time or another already.

So what is the purpose of life? I don’t know but it isn’t to work ourselves to death and it isn’t to feed our children into the maws of corporate giants to spit out ever more profit for the lucky 1% of the population that are equity lords (thanks to Neal Stephenson for coining this term in his novel, The Diamond Age) in our society. But I don’t think it is to just sit on a beach either, smoking weed. If we all did that, life would still be short and brutish—you’d be old, toothless and dead before 40. No thanks*.

There is something much more complicated, much more beautiful, much more dangerous going on. I just don’t know what it is.

(* If you are unsure about our use of at least some technology, I recommend you see the film, Quest for Fire, again. It shows what life is like for a primitive tribe that has lost its one source of fire; it’s not a pretty sight. Life without fire is not pleasant for the group. Fire is the basis for cooking, warmth, development of new technologies and for protection. It allows them to extend their day (because they can see at night.) It has subtle effects like allowing them to hang around the fire at night and begin to tell each other stories. They now can pass on information to their children and each other. They can entertain themselves. They can discover humor and leisure time. They can become more creative.

So anyway, they send out three hunters to find fire and bring it back to their cave. The three hunters have many adventures, the most important of which is their contact with a more advanced group that has mastered the art of making fire. If you think this skill is trivial, remember that in subsequent episodes of the hit TV series, Survivor, not one modern human could successfully make fire despite the fact that each of them knew, in advance, after watching the contestants in the first series, that this would be a huge advantage in the game to outwit and outplay their opponents and win a million dollars. Yet not one of the next 16, after more than two days of effort, could do it.)