Chapter 10: Metrics
Various metrics are commonly used to measure the “health” of an economy: Gross National Product, Gross Domestic Product, the performance of stock exchanges and currencies, and balances of trade are a few. They all fail miserably to paint a clear picture of what it’s like to live in that economy as a paid employee. The “economy” often looks great by those criteria in contrast to the extreme hardship and stress lived by most working people.
It’s also a challenge to compare different time periods. Besides inflation and other variables, what constitutes a living has varied dramatically over time. Beyond the universal needs of food, shelter, water and medical care, many of the today’s necessities did not exist in 1900, and vice versa. Perhaps a better picture might be found by looking at how many hours a week it takes to make ends meet in different eras, regions, and for people of various income and wealth percentiles. How many hours make a living wage? Remember that a living wage means that income just covers living expenses, assuming no unexpected expenses or income losses occur.
Careful analysis of available data shows that as of 2019, ¼ to 1/3 of working Americans cannot survive on the accepted standard of 40 hours a week or even twice that. You can see more detail in the long version of this book. In fact, millions of Americans would have to work over 120 hours a week at their pay rate just to meet living expenses. There are 168 hours in a week. One must be at around the fiftieth income/wealth percentile to be able to break even on 40 hours per week.
At that level, you could be homeless or deep in debt very quickly if you lost your job or incurred an unexpected expense or two. In order to be able to absorb such a setback, one would have to be in about the sixty-fifth to seventieth percentile or above.
Other costs measurable in hours include commute times, time spent paying and disputing bills, and costs of car maintenance and repair. A commute of half an hour each way is common, and an hour each way is not unusual, especially in larger cities. A job applicant is expected to absorb such a commute. This translates to another 10-14 hours per week. If you are able to get the recommended 8 hours of sleep most nights, that’s another 56 hours a week needed for basic survival.
Using person-hours of work also gets around the illusions created by using currency as a measure. Two families both bringing in $60,000/year live very different realities if one family is living from one income at 40 hours a week while the other family is living from 3 $20,000/year incomes of 40 hours a week each meaning 120 hours a week.
Another more useful measure would be a ratio of salary to cost of living per unit of time. This automatically filters out the effects of inflation. Let’s say the cost of living is Y per week and one’s salary is X per week. Anybody for whom X/Y = 1 is breaking even with nothing to spare. If your X/Y < 1 then you’re not making it through the month. If X/Y > 1 then you are, at least a little bit, able to save a little at the end of the month. If X/Y > 2, then you’re able to save half of your wages after paying expenses. This also scales very well over time.
It is also important to avoid using averages as a sole indicator of income distribution. Averages easily skew upwards, giving an unrealistically rosy picture of the life of people in a community. For example, in a town of 1,001 people, one of whom makes $1 billion a year and the rest of whom work for them making $25,000 a year, the average income comes out to $1,023,976.20. Taken by itself, that creates an extremely misleading impression of a thriving community of wealthy people. In such a town, the median income is $25,000, the mode is $25,000, and the range is $999,975,000. In this context, the difference between the average and the median shows just how extreme the disparity is in this hypothetical community.
We also have to keep in mind the impact of investment income on one’s options, degree of freedom, and quality of life. This is out of meaningful reach certainly the lower fifty percent of the population, and only marginally accessible to those from the fiftieth to the ninetieth percentiles. Only those in the ninetieth percentile and above can realistically expect to be able to rely on investment income to cover a major part of one’s expenses.
As mentioned earlier, one must have at least $100,000 that one can invest and leave untouched for decades in order for your investment to make a meaningful contribution to your income and wealth. At least eighty percent of the population just can’t manage that. Even if one is able to save and invest some, any unexpected expense would force one to liquidate one’s investments. That option is only available to those modern feudal lords, the billionaires at the very top of the wealth-and-power pyramid.
In terms of metrics to measure the “economic health” of a society, one would also have to factor in the degree of access, or lack of access, to investment options. Throughout the lower fifty percentiles, investment income is effectively zero. From there to the eightieth percentile, it is barely significant. Only in the uppermost fractional percentiles is investment income enough to live on without stress. Any meaningful measure of the economic health of a society must be centered on the well-being of the people who make it up in order to be of any real use. Any other kind of metric is worthless elitist econobabble.
In establishing metrics, it’s always a challenge to define what a “living” is. Beyond food, shelter, safety, health, water and a few other universals, a “living” varies wildly from epoch to epoch and place to place. On the one hand, it’s clear that a private jet is not a necessity anywhere, ever. On the other hand, Internet access may be a necessity in Tokyo while a functioning well may be a necessity in a small village in Africa. A tractor is a necessity for a farmer. A boat is a necessity for a fisherman/woman, but a luxury for a city dweller. That is harder to quantify than the hours of one’s time that one must spend to attain a “living.”
Perhaps a good rule of thumb would be to define a “living” as access to all that empowers one to live and function in their place and time without experiencing deprivation or oppression. If the members of a society normally have access to all resources necessary to pursue their life, liberty and happiness while experiencing a high degree of empowerment, well-being and fulfillment, then the economy is healthy. If not, then the society and economy are not healthy, regardless of any other measurements.
The classical concepts postulating that if the wealthy and gargantuan corporations are getting richer, the amount of stuff being produced and consumed is rising faster and faster, and stock prices are rising, then the society is economically healthy are complete fallacies. These concepts are as meaningless as the concept that if the royal family is prospering, then the realm is in good shape. In fact, the socio-economic paradigm operating is one that cannot function unless the huge majority of the population are perpetually disempowered and disenfranchised. It is functionally no different from classical feudalism. It is truly a pyramid scheme in every sense of the word, though it is legal in such societies, inexorably siphoning control and resources from those at the bottom of the pyramid to those at the top. If we are to ever craft a truly free, democratic and thriving society, we must discard all of the currently-accepted socio-economic metrics.
The current paradigm is a win-lose-lose-lose-lose-lose… paradigm. It cannot be made to support an free and democratic society. In order to achieve this, we must strive for a win-win-win-win society in which there is strong reinforcement for working together to strengthen each other in symbiosis, rather than the current pattern of mutual predation. The new paradigm will have to be self-modifying and adaptive to experience of what does and does not work, within the core principles.
For any metric to be useful, it must describe and measure the hours of work needed to thrive, mental, physical, and community health and well-being, the prevailing degree of happiness, fulfillment, freedom, quality of life and engagement of the people.
We will also need to examine the dynamics of interaction between economics and government. There can be no free and democratic, empowered society without both government and economics of, by and for the People. No hierarchical power structure is compatible with this principle.
The Soviet Union strove to create a democratic economy, but developed a government repressive of the will of the people, and stratified into a caste system of Party-members, celebrities, and the rest of the people in a close approximation of feudalism. In the United States, the Constitutional basis of government is set out as of, by and for the people; but the socio-economic power structure reproduces the feudal structures almost perfectly, spawning a power structure that steadily enriches and empowers a microscopic modern feudal elite at the expense of the life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, well-being, respect, quality of life and the very existence of the rest of us modern-day serfs and peasants. Both failed to achieve their intended empowered, egalitarian, democratic goals.
For metrics, we also must look at psycho-social measurements of the happiness, well-being and empowerment of the people themselves alongside how elected and appointed officials self-rate their performance. With the creation of a central, universally accessible online forum and database, outreach and responsiveness will be in real time and constantly updating. This will function similarly to social media but will be geared and oriented to the processes and functioning of the community and government. Existing psychological metrics can be adapted to form measures of people’s experience living in their community and society. This online forum will support a lively public discourse in which all will equally be able to contribute, express, discuss, and analyze what’s working, what isn’t, and innovative ideas and suggestions. In the absence of hierarchical power structures, there will be little or no risk of reprisal against anybody for expressing their thoughts, feelings and suggestions. This online forum will form a channel for free and lively exchange of information, ideas, suggestions, and creative solutions. It will also serve as a way, for example, for potato farmers to see directly how many potatoes they need to grow to meet the real needs; car manufacturers can track how many cars and parts are actually needed and which features are working for people or which are not. It can be a vehicle for logistics, public discourse, self-examining and self-improvement for the community and the society. It can also potentially be a medium of interaction between elected officials and their constituents. With the development of such a forum, the impact of a pandemic or blizzard will be less disabling.
Under the current paradigm, one’s degree of wealth or position is often seen as a measure of one’s “worth,” worthiness, productivity, contribution, and moral fitness. Such criteria are utterly worthless. The illusion or myth of “meritocracy” is easily proven false. An enterprise or any social structure is sustained by the combined efforts of all people in them. In typical large corporations, the CEO earns in a day or less what a median employee earns in a year. In one corporation, the CEO makes in twenty seconds what the median employee makes in a year. Who can possibly determine whose contribution is greater: the engineer or designer, the assembly-line worker, the truck driver, the floor sweeper, the secretary, or the cafeteria worker? Would you rank the organs in your body into worthy and unworthy? Would you over-nourish your heart or brain at the expense of depriving your leg of nutrients? One thing that is clear is the CEO’s contribution to the enterprise is not hundreds or thousands of times greater than that of any employee. In fact, the main focus of the CEO is to keep increase profits, stock prices and market share, and to make the wealthiest investors happy. They often contribute literally nothing other than consolidating the wealth and power of other modern feudal lords.
The notion of meritocracy is a myth and a propaganda ploy to keep people motivated to go on playing the game as it is. There are just enough rags-to-riches stories to make it feel possible that if you work hard and long enough, you too can “make it,” just as in any casino the photos of big winners on the walls can make you feel like if they can win, you can too if you just play long enough. Both illusions have the same effect. Both are not, strictly speaking, absolute lies; but they are disastrously misleading. It leads to the modern feudal lords being held up as ultra-worthy role models to be admired and emulated while those who struggle and fall are reviled as somehow lazy, morally deficient, stupid, or somehow inferior and treated accordingly. People at the bottom often view themselves through this same lens. They were conditioned by their culture to do so.
In fact, in the United States, employees’ earnings are almost completely decoupled from their productivity. In 2018 the average employee’s monetary productivity was $220,480 per year, of which they were only paid $37,400. The rest went to the employers and to the ultra-wealthy who control them. Since 1970, employee productivity by this measure has increased about 200% while wages have increased only 12%. Stock prices have averaged 10% growth per year, which benefits almost exclusively the feudal lords at the top of the pyramid, the top 10% of whom control 92% of all stock. At the rate this mechanism is working, we will soon see a time when only those in the top five income percentiles will be earning a living wage. The rest of us will be slaves in everything but name. Factor in inflation, and you can see the picture clearly. From 1989 to 2018, the top one percent have increased their wealth by a staggering twenty-one trillion dollars, while the bottom fifty percent have lost $900 billion. Besides the utter fallacy of evaluating a person’s worth in economic terms, these facts prove that the “meritocracy” is at best a myth and at worst a subtle but effective means of shaping the behaviors of populations. If the game isn’t completely changed very soon from its foundations, we, or our children, will find ourselves living in conditions where chronic exhaustion, undernourishment, survival struggle and stress will put us at risk of being unable to take any action at all. This paradigm shift must come and soon if we are to both survive and ever achieve a free and democratic, empowered society. The alternative is a Dark Age that could last hundreds or thousands of years.
Just as in feudalism, the lords were allowed to take whatever portion of a serf’s, peasant, or craftsperson’s work product as they saw fit, so we see in the modern workplace environment. Employment agreements usually include language that states that any inventions or innovations by the employee are the property of the company. Some go so far as to include things conceived or produced at home independent of work. So if you make twenty thousand dollars a year and come up with something that saves or makes the company millions of dollars a year, you will most likely get a handshake (if your manager doesn’t claim credit for your innovation) and still only twenty thousand dollars a year. Your hard work and contribution will only very rarely ever translate into enough more pay to secure your access to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or even your right to occupy space. If you write and record a hit song in your free time, some employment agreements even give your employer the rights to that song. No different from feudalism.
The myths in each dysfunctional paradigm are unsurprisingly similar. In Medieval societies, the myth was that God placed royalty over the rest of us, and to go against them was to earn a place in Hell. And it was assumed that without the lords to rule over them, the serfs and peasants would descend into chaos. In the slavery era in the United States, the myth was that the dark-skinned Africans were inherently inferior to their Euro-American masters and that slavery was their natural and proper condition, even going so far as to say that the slavemasters “civilized” the slaves and made them “better.” In modern feudal societies such as the United States, the myth is that the modern feudal lords are where they are because of their fundamental superiority, and that the vast majority who struggle to make ends meet are in that position because of some inherent inferiority or unworthiness.
Those at the top of the pyramid can cause vast harm to employees, the public, customers/clients, and the world with no major repercussions. One pharmaceutical CEO raised the price of a lifesaving medication from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill after maneuvering to get control of the rights to the drug, which the CEO and his company had no part in developing. He did it because, in the rules of the current paradigm, he’s allowed to. Yet if an employee were to smuggle out some doses to save the life of a homeless veteran who needed it desperately, that employee would be fired, probably criminally and civilly charged, and have their life ruined. It is also not uncommon to see people in positions of upper management who have literally no grasp of the processes or people over which they hold power, and no willingness to learn. The hierarchical command structure ensures that power will be abused without consequences while innovation and initiative from low in the pyramid will be squelched and suppressed. A bad leader’s dysfunctionality is propagated down the chain of command and imposed on all under them. Any who speak up or oppose will be disciplined or fired with no recourse, and be burdened with a job-search-killing bad reference in their record.
Some believe and argue that we’re better off under the current paradigm than we would be otherwise, claiming that we are compensated in ways beyond our salary. Technically this is true to a point but is just as much a myth as “meritocracy.”
“Benefits” such as health coverage are helpful, but only because medical care is so extremely expensive that all but the modern feudal lords and their enforcers/protectors cannot hope to afford treatment for any serious medical procedure. Even routine visits like a yearly physical exam cost enough to make us have to choose which bills to pay and which to delay that month. Employee health coverage does mitigate that situation; but the employee “contribution” takes a huge bite out of one’s paycheck. That portion has grown hundreds of percent from the 1990’s to the 2010’s, as have deductibles. What has shrunk is what’s covered and how much. Every insurance company employs people whose job it is to find and exploit any legally defensible way to deny claims, sometimes going so far as to deny claims out-of-hand and leave it to the insured to challenge the denial, at a time when the insured or their loved-one is already sick or injured and under extreme stress. The situation is so extreme that one sees insurance adjusters with little or no medical knowledge dictating to medical practitioners what diagnostics and treatment to perform or not, where, and how. An insurance company is a business. Their priority is profits, stock price, and market share. Strong reinforcers guarantee that the health and well-being of insured people is a secondary or tertiary priority that is almost always overridden by business priorities.
The right to healthcare and access to a healthy lifestyle is part and parcel of the right to life, much less liberty and the pursuit and happiness.
The insurance industry in all of its forms is a parasitic industry that actually drives up the cost and drives down the accessibility of medical treatment. It creates no real value like a car or a surgical procedure. It fills a manufactured need whose existence is utterly arbitrary and absolutely unnecessary.
Imagine you live in a town where gangs extort protection money from everybody. Imagine your employer will cover three quarters of your protection payments, if you opt in and let them deduct three percent of your paycheck. That is not a reasonable solution. The reasonable solution is to shut down the gangs’ operations.
Similarly, when the current socio-economic paradigm is shut down, decommissioned, and replaced with one based on an organic model of peer-based, consensus-based or democratic symbiosis, there will be no dichotomy of employer-employee, landlord-tenant, lender-borrower, lord-peasant, no need for currency of any kind, and no barriers to access to resources for anybody. Medical care will be given by practitioners based on medical considerations only, for the good of the patient. The only limitations will be the skill of the practitioner and the state of the art at the time.
No metric can obscure the fact that the prevailing socio-economic paradigm will inevitably always generate escalating disparity in terms of access to resources, quality of life, degree of freedom and respect one is afforded, power over one’s own life and access to interact with those in government. It is functionally indistinguishable from Medieval feudalism except that Medieval feudalism was relatively stable while modern economic feudalism is escalating the disparity geometrically. It is a pyramid scheme pure and simple, no different from the illegal varieties.
It is quite true that money cannot buy happiness. We must create that ourselves. Yet in the dominant socio-economic environment, the lack of money can cut one off from all resources including a place to occupy space. Being disempowered, disenfranchised, worked chronically to exhaustion or unable to find work, and frequently devalued is most definitely an utterly unjustifiable hindrance to one’s most basic rights and most definitely compromise physical, mental and emotional health in major ways.
A microscopically small segment of the population controls an ever-increasing share of all resources, including land. This same segment sets the tone for prevailing cost of living and ensures that for most of us it is higher than prevailing wages.
Keep in mind that most land ownership in the United States, for example, traces its lineage back to the systematic wholesale slaughter and destruction of the millions of people and dozens of nations that were here before the Europeans arrived.
There’s no conceivable justification for one person, organization or group owning or controlling resources that they don’t directly use and blocking access to such resources from others. In the new paradigm, this will cease. It will be legally impossible to own or control any resource that one isn’t directly using or to block or limit access of another. Thus, the renter under current modern feudalism will be the legal owner of their residence, and the former landlord will be the owner of their residence. The same will apply to groups and/or enterprises. Land and other resources currently “owned” by wealthy people and corporations as a “tax dodge” or investment will become open for use by any who wish or need to use them. We will still need zoning laws to ensure safety and environmental preservation. We will need to learn to establish reasonable and respectful – and somewhat flexible - limits on how much of any resource an individual, family, enterprise or other group can claim, to prevent abuses. We will need to develop legal mechanisms for the establishment and transfer of ownership, as well as for resolving disputes in the most equitable ways possible. Any unoccupied living units, of which there are well over ten million in the United States, will be immediately available for habitation. Legal processes will need to emerge to ensure that this process is done in a fair, orderly, compassionate and reasonable way. Resources such as marinas and country clubs that are currently the public venues of the modern feudal elite will be open to all persons. Any feudal lords who try to destroy such premises to prevent the “riff-raff” from using them will be guilty of a crime, as will any who try to vandalize them to “get back at” the former feudal lords.
For a precedent, we can look back to the concept of the “commons” that predates the advent of feudalism in Europe. In many towns, flour mills and lumber mills, water sources, much of the land and other resources belonged to the people themselves. In the United States now we see some cities planting “edible forests,” large tracts of land maintained with a plethora of edible plants using permaculture methods and available to all. There are many other similar examples. We will need to take this to a whole new level and apply the same principles to every aspect of public life.
Without the right to occupy space, eat, breathe, drink, work, and remain healthy, the rights to life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, religious freedom, freedom of speech and the others become a cruel mocking joke, a promise given in bad faith with no intention of being honored.
To get from here to the new paradigm, we will need to make a rapid transition. We will agree on a date. We will need to act decisively, forcefully, non-violently, compassionately and respectfully to all, including those who oppose us. In the wee hours of that date, all banks, financial institutions, stock exchanges and similar facilities will be physically blocked from access, cut off from power and jammed from communication. Any persons inside at the time will be safely and respectfully escorted out and informed of the transition to the new paradigm. All persons will cease charging or paying each other for goods and/or services. Corporate command hierarchies will be ignored as operations will abruptly transition to peer-run through consensus. When newly-deposed members of the former command structures will ignored and informed of the transition. We will treat them with respect and compassion but not obey them. We will invite them to join in the shared operations as a peer among peers and bear them no ill will from the past. If they try to use force to reassert their dominance, we will defend ourselves with the minimum possible harm and then render assistance to any injured.
Some former modern lords will feel like victims due to being deprived of their former power positions, privilege, and opulence. We will strive to reassure them that nobody is going to attack them or drag them out of their homes, they will want for nothing, and they will be respected as equals, alongside and not above others.
The mutually predatory, adversarial dynamics of the current socio-economic paradigm are destructive to all and to the very world we call home. Among employers and employees, landlords and tenants, lords and peasants, abuses abound. One gains only at the expense of another. There are abuses among all of these groups pitted against each other. It is a paradigm destined to brutalize all who inhabit it and live their lives by its rules and principles.
In the new paradigm, we will see metrics of human happiness, well-being, productivity, health, creativity, and life satisfaction steadily rise. We will metrics for crime, suicide, waste, injustice, and violence steadily sink. The new empowering paradigm will facilitate and precipitate the emergence of a new Renaissance that will dwarf the European Renaissance in degree and duration.