Introduction
Humanity has made plenty of progress, and yet we see plenty of problems. Can we find elegant solutions to many of the current problems? Can we make our society the best that it can be? Yes, of course. This entire book is about it.
Plenty of Progress
If we look at just the past 250 years, we will find that we have made tremendous progress.
If we were pondering our future 250 years ago, we would not have imagined electricity or internal combustion engines or computers or electronics or medical drugs and technology and all the benefits that we would enjoy with each one of them. In 1770, we didn't have cars, trains, planes, washing machines, dryers, electric stoves, microwave ovens, radios, televisions, phones, computers, smartphones, tablets, ballpoint pens, etc. We have made tremendous technological progress.
Since 1770, democracy has blossomed all over the world; slavery has been officially abolished; slaves gained their freedom and voting rights; women have gained the right to vote; widows can remarry even in those countries where it was considered a taboo; divorce is not merely accepted but is routine in many countries. Societies are accommodating of the unique situations and stages in peoples lives as evidenced by reserved parking spots and seats, wheelchair ramps, parental leave, civil unions, etc. We have seen many social changes.
We have made substances, called drugs, that can kill germs that make us sick. Smallpox has been eradicated, we are close to eradicating polio, we can perform surgery with a high success rate, we can revive a person whose heart has stopped. It is clear that we have made plenty of progress in improving our health through medicine and surgery.
We have gained plenty of knowledge. We now know that there are things called black holes. We know that some twinkling stars in the night sky are not stars, but very large clusters of stars that we call a galaxy. In fact, there are many galaxies, all filled with many stars. We now know that an atom is divisible; it is made of subatomic particles, and these are themselves made of yet smaller things. We have expanded our knowledge of nature a lot.
Many countries don't just tolerate, but respect the diversity in people's faiths, beliefs, spirituality, and religions. In these countries, people are free to choose their spiritual guides. In these countries, people are not persecuted for religious beliefs. We have reached a higher level of wisdom regarding spirituality and religion.
In 1770, if we had a glimpse of all the progress that has happened from then until now, we would have considered the present-day situation to be pretty good. Being in the present, can we call our present-day societies to be pretty good societies? Not really, since we have plenty of problems.
Plenty of Problems
While humanity has made plenty of progress in many areas, we still see plenty of problems.
Even in the so-called developed and rich countries, we still have poverty. Some people cannot find their means to live and survive; they are unemployed. Some people have to live on streets, some people do not have resources to buy their own food, there is malnutrition in some people and obesity in others. Some people in these rich countries have a standard of living worse than even prisoners in those countries. If this is the state of developed nations, then what can we say about the situation in developing countries?
We have man-made disasters like the meltdown of nuclear power plants, oil spills, dam breaches, bridge collapses, planes falling out of the skies, garbage in our oceans, DDT, mercury and microplastics in our food supplies. We have medical and recreational drug problems.
We routinely encounter natural calamities like floods and famines, hurricanes and tornadoes, earthquakes and tsunamis, volcanoes and wildfires. We have climate change induced by human activity. There are people that claim that not all natural calamities are purely natural. There are many claims that some of these are caused by our actions (for example, wildfires caused by faulty equipment that throws a spark, earthquakes caused by fracking). There are claims that some natural calamities have increased in intensity due to our actions (for example, the strength of hurricanes has increased over time due to human-induced climate change, increase in floods and famines). Do these kinds of claims have at least some truth?
We live in a world where many newborn children are born in debt, because they are born in a country that has an enormous amount of debt and the country has no plans to pay off its debt anytime soon. We have inflation, and that is a major hurdle for most people in planning their retirement; or having one. We have a large percentage of people who have no employment. We have asset price bubbles and crashes and every time this occurs, those who are in charge of our policies and its administration are scrambling to contain its ill-effects; so far they have not managed to figure out a policy to satisfactorily address these issues. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and there is nothing in our current policies to handle this situation.
We are not only dealing with problems that are caused by incompetence, mistakes, and carelessness, but we are also dealing with problems caused by malice and selfishness. We still have thieves. We have scams and pyramid schemes. There is corruption and bribery. We have people selling extremely harmful drugs to teenagers. We have terrorism.
Every year, someone is awarded a prize for his or her contributions to the peace on earth, and yet we still have conventional wars, trade wars and cold wars.
This list of problems is long, disappointing, and frustrating.
Problems, Society, and this Book
Once we choose to notice problems, we will start seeing many.
Only a few of the problems we observe are not caused or influenced by society. Typically, these problems are truly personal in nature. Society may be in a position to help mitigate or solve them.
For all problems that are not truly personal in nature, society is either the cause of the problem, or an enabler of the problematic situation, or a contributor to the problem. A few examples of problems where society plays a role are: unemployment, homelessness, theft, bodily harm to others in the course of such theft, and scams.
We see many problems in our present-day society. Clearly, our society has not done enough to eliminate them.
However, societies have laws and police forces to enforce those laws. Societies also have defense departments to protect themselves from other societies. The existence of these systems is evidence that societies want to deal with problems.
Society's willingness to deal with problems is necessary for a discussion about the problems, their root causes, and potential solutions that could eliminate them.
Society is made up of citizens. For any problem to be solved, citizens must acknowledge that the issue being discussed is indeed a problem. Without this acknowledgement, society cannot do anything further about it.
Broadly speaking, in order to eliminate a problem in our society, we should do the following:
- Identify the root cause of that problem.
- Find a way to eliminate the root cause. That is, find a solution and propose it to everyone.
- Obtain a consensus about which one of all the proposed solutions should be implemented.
- Implement the chosen solution.
The process - from acknowledging an issue as a problem to implementing a solution - takes time. Moreover, societal problems are interrelated. Thus, identification of the root cause (or causes) of all those problems and designing remedies for them is much harder compared to dealing with multiple but independent problems. So, it is not easy to eliminate all problems quickly.
Despite these challenges, societies have been addressing individual problems and hence we see progress. This progress shows us that citizens have the desire to solve these problems and hence society addresses them.
But, there is a difference between addressing a problem and eliminating it.
This book sets its goal much higher than merely addressing the problems. This book identifies the root cause of most of these problems, justifies that claim, and proposes an alternative set of systems to be used in our society. These systems directly or indirectly eliminate many problems mentioned in the previous section.
The remaining problems from the previous section, which are not directly or indirectly eliminated by these alternative systems, can also be easily solved. The alternative systems mentioned in the previous paragraph create a prioritization and funding mechanism to support the elimination of remaining problems. After all, most problems can be eliminated with the right approach and appropriate funding. For instance, the problems in the categories of human induced climate change and environment pollution will not be directly or indirectly addressed by any proposal in this book.
When these proposed systems are implemented, the living conditions of almost all citizens in society (both present and future citizens) will be improved to such an extent that further improvements will be difficult to find. It is important to note that 'almost all' is not the same as 'all', and yet, it implies a broader inclusion than 'significant majority'.
A gist of the approach adopted to achieve the above stated goal is as follows:
Society treats all citizens in a fair and responsible way, and society makes it very difficult for bad people to gain a significant advantage over others.
Root Cause of Problems
We have made tremendous progress in knowledge and technology, and yet we have a long list of problems. Why do we have so many problems?
It is because we have not made significant progress in our social organization. The social progress has been significantly lagging behind the tremendous progress in knowledge and technology. Progress in knowledge and technology helps us solve problems that deal with the physical world. It does not directly solve social problems.
Moreover, this imbalance introduces new problems as our social systems are not designed to help people cope with the adverse effects of our ever-evolving knowledge and technology. For example, every advance in mechanization and automation introduces some amount of additional unemployment. The tags associated with recent advances in technology are robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. While there are benefits of these kinds of technological advances, some people encounter a net reduction in their quality of life. Those that are impacted by unemployment face scarcity of money.
When people face scarcity of money, bad things start to happen. The direct effects of scarcity of money is that some people don't get proper nutrition, some people become homeless, those who may have homes may not have enough money to heat their homes in winter, etc.
When people try to solve their money scarcity problems, and if they have no other help, they may easily get tempted to steal, take bribes, misuse social welfare systems, abuse social welfare systems, harm others, and even commit suicide.
The potential for scarcity of money can lead some rich people to do bad things like: influence the system to have loopholes, exploit the loopholes, and in general game the system in some way.
Scarcity of money also affects societies. Some examples are: societies by their inaction allow organizations to pollute the environment in many ways, societies can't allocate enough money for cleaning up the environmental mess that they create, countries invade other countries, etc.
Many of the current problems are a direct result of the lack of money to do something; that is, scarcity of money. Of the remaining problems, many are indirectly related to scarcity of money.
This scarcity of money is partially due to the fact that we have not yet set our monetary system fairly. The other part is because our social welfare systems are inadequate.
The most prominent symptom of this unfair monetary system is the increasing wealth inequality. We already know that we have wealth inequality. In most societies, the richest 20% individuals own more than 50% of the wealth. In some societies, the richest 20% own more than 80% of the wealth. Worldwide, the richest 10% own more than 85% of the wealth of the world and the poorest 50% own less than 2% of the wealth. Moreover, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; wealth inequality is increasing.
Societies and economies worldwide are experiencing increasing mechanization and automation.
Who owns most of that? Considering the existing level of wealth inequality, the rich own most of it. The rich profit from it, and hence, the rich are getting richer.
What are its effects on the masses? Dropping labor participation rate, more unemployment, poverty for the unemployed, and inability of the poor to get out of poverty. That is, the non-rich are getting relatively poorer.
It may seem that increasing mechanization and automation is the root cause of increasing wealth inequality and hence our problems; but it isn't.
The increasing wealth inequality results from the unfairness in our present-day monetary system.
The claim made in the previous paragraph is elaborated and justified fully in the chapter titled Reasons for the Rich Getting Richer. So readers have a choice: either the reader can read that chapter now and then return to this discussion, or the reader can assume that the logic presented in that chapter is sound and continue with this discussion now (and read that chapter later).
The unfairness in our present-day monetary system is the root cause of most of our problems.
Money, wealth and ownership are all social constructs. They don't occur in nature. To eliminate the unfairness associated with our monetary systems we will have to change those systems.
Since we have created these social constructs, we have decided the rules associated with these social constructs. We have changed the rules many times, and we keep changing them every year. So, we can change those rules for the betterment of the entire society - not just a select few.
Now let us discuss our social welfare systems.
Generally speaking, we are problem solvers. Problems provide us the motivation to solve them, and we have been solving problems. Currently, there are many solutions in play to solve many problems. Some of these solutions get referred to as social welfare systems.
In the absence of these solutions, the increasing wealth inequality would have caused widespread poverty and made life intolerable for the majority. The current solutions are better than not having them at all.
When we think about these current solutions, we will find that many good and many appealing ideas have come forth. These solutions were crafted by many well-meaning and intelligent people. We are fortunate to be standing on the shoulders of giants. However, there are problems that those giants couldn't tackle; and hence, we have a long list of problems.
The fact that some citizens face unemployment, poverty, homelessness, lack of money to take care of their health issues, etc. indicates that our current welfare systems are inadequate.
Even after we make our monetary system fair, some people will face scarcity of money. This is explained in the chapter titled Clarifying Utopia. So, while a fair monetary system is necessary, it alone is not sufficient for solving all our problems.
We need a social welfare system that is capable of ensuring that scarcity of money does not become a problem. We need a social welfare system that is capable of rendering poverty harmless.
So far, the increasing wealth inequality situation has not degenerated into poverty and misery for a majority of the non-rich. Note that the non-rich form the significant majority of the entire population.
If we do nothing about it, at some point in the next few decades, a majority will be adversely impacted by this increasing wealth inequality. The children, grand-children and the future generations of the present-day majority will face poverty. It is better to tackle the situation as soon as possible rather than wait for it to get intolerable for the majority.
We are free to explore other solutions to our problems; and ideally, eliminate the problems for our future generations as well. We should not ignore them or minimize the severity of the problems we face.
To solve most of the current problems, we need to make significant changes to the constructs related to money, wealth, ownership and social welfare.
It is possible that some of our predecessors may have thought of elegant solutions to the problems that we face today. But, they lived in an era in which their solutions could not be implemented due to technological limitations. We are fortunate to live in a much more advanced technological society. Computer, software, and communication technology has progressed significantly in this century, and now it is capable of implementing systems that could not be implemented earlier. Even if we were reinventing some previously invented social wheel, we will have success at implementing it, when previously it was impossible.
Holistic Approach and Utopia
What can we do to solve our current problems? Broadly speaking, there is a spectrum of problem-solving approaches, with Targeted on one end and Holistic on the other end.
When adopting the targeted approach for solving social problems, we think about a specific problem in isolation and think of ways to solve it individually. Many times, in such an approach, we also reduce the scope of the solution to the problem by excluding special cases of the problem from the sought solution. This is the default approach that anyone would adopt when facing problems; because they desire a quick relief from the problem.
We have been using the targeted approach for centuries, and it leads to progress. All social progress that we can see today (including the present-day social welfare system) has been a result of such targeted problem-solving. We have been addressing one problem at a time with the intention to solve it. Those intentions include desires to do the least changes that just solves the problem and leaves other things untouched. While the targeted approach results in some progress, it always leaves much more to be done later. Sometimes, solutions to targeted problems themselves lead to more problems due to the things that were not considered when crafting a solution to the original problem.
Some social changes may appear very large and may take great effort, but at its core, they are changing just one thing. For instance, consider the situation that people from some geographical area fought wars (violent or non-violent) and won them so that they gained independence or freedom. Having gained this independence, a new country is created and local people from that country can self-rule. But ultimately, all that has changed by that act of independence is who rules. Even in countries that have been democratically ruled by locals for centuries, there are a minority of people who are suffering immensely, a significant minority of people who cannot lead a comfortable life, and there exist many other social challenges that eventually lead to crime (like manufacture, sale and use of legally banned drugs).
When adopting the holistic approach for solving social problems, we think about all these problems, their causes, their interrelationships, how all things should ideally be (with reasons), and what kind of systems would be required for that ideal state. This kind of holistic thought process leads to a vision about how all things should really be. We get a better grasp of the interrelationships, constraints and trade-offs. Solutions crafted after all these considerations are better than if we had targeted problems individually and serially.
The holistic approach is harder to do because it requires one to step back from individual problems and think about many problems, and the systems in which these problems cannot occur. Because it is harder to do, this approach is hardly adopted. But harder to envision a solution to many problems does not mean longer to implement the envisioned solution. It all depends on what has been envisioned.
With a holistic approach, we can envision an ideal society. For this book, the word society will mean a country or something larger - like the European Union. Every society has many aspects. In an ideal society, in the judgment of a majority of its citizens, all these aspects should be good. But a society possessing all aspects that are merely good does not make the society an ideal society. For the society to be called ideal, all these aspects should be good in such a way and to such an extent that attempting to increase the goodness of one aspect would reduce the goodness of at least one other aspect; and that reduction in goodness of those other aspects is deemed unacceptable by the majority.
The word Utopia represents, in a single word, the idea of an ideal society.
We could continue on the path of making targeted and incremental progress, but that will only make things incrementally better. With each targeted change, we will have achieved only a local optima.
The targeted approach is unlikely to get us to an ideal society, primarily because we never aimed for it. In other words, if we don't think about it and plan to accomplish it, we will not be able to live in the best possible society; because we never considered it.
It is better to take the holistic approach. It is better to desire an ideal society rather than merely an incrementally better society. With holistic approach, and aiming for an ideal society, we will achieve a global optima.
Utopia, an ideal society, is achievable when a majority of its citizens can agree on a single technologically feasible vision of what ideal means for their society.
This book, Building Utopia, is the first book in a series of books that portrays one such vision of an ideal society, a Utopia.
Well-Being of All Citizens
The intent of any society can be said to be the benefit of its citizens. Notable in this intent is the absence of a word that would imply the benefit of all citizens. But, we can choose to make our society better, or much better or even the best possible for all our fellow citizens.
Once we start considering all citizens, we will have begun on the path of creating a society that is beneficial to all its current citizens, including us, our loved ones, and our descendants. But the word benefit does not adequately capture the essence of what we would want from our society.
The purpose of an ideal society, a Utopia, is the well-being of all its citizens. The word well-being is wide in its meaning and scope. A society in which all its citizens do well and have a good life could be considered to be an ideal society, a Utopia.
But, such an ideal society does not happen by accident. A society must adopt well-being of all citizens as its primary goal. Then it must start doing everything to ensure the well-being of all its citizens. Such a society will eventually become an ideal society, a Utopia.
The following paragraphs mention the main ideas, concepts and systems that will we find in an ideal society, a Utopia.
Since an ideal society is focused on the well-being of all its citizens, the question, "what can the society do for you?", is more important than "what should you do for your society?".
Since well-being of its citizens is the main goal, an ideal society will have social welfare systems; and they will be designed with that goal in mind. Each one of our current social welfare systems have arisen to tackle some problem; they are problem-centric, not goal-centric. In this context, we will replace all existing social welfare systems with just two systems: the Utopian Payment Model and Social Employment.
The general idea of well-being of all citizens can only be accomplished after we have ensured the monetary well-being of all citizens. For that, we need to set up the monetary system of a society on a fair basis. To make a society ideal, we cannot eliminate the concept of money from that society. Goodness in many non-monetary aspects of a society is heavily dependent on the goodness of the monetary system. In this context, we will discuss wealth redistribution, wealth as the sole basis for taxation, a new fiscal policy, a new monetary policy and a new foreign trade policy.
The monetary system of any society exists within an overarching organization of the society. Societies, over the entire history of human civilization, have explored many ways of social organization. A few names for these organizations are: tribes and tribal lords, kings and kingdoms, empires and emperors, democracy, capitalism, communism, socialism, dictatorship, oligarchy, etc.
Each name in the preceding list indicates the primary focus of the method of organization. However, none of these organizations were ever exactly what their name claimed it to be. Moreover, every society has elements of its organization from more than one of those names. Many of the current societies are democratic, capitalistic, and socialist at the same time, and they also practice some form of oligarchy.
What is the organization of an ideal society? An ideal society will have a blend of the more noble of the organization ideas mentioned above. Thus, a dictatorship is unlikely to be called an ideal society, however benevolent its dictator may be. In any form of organization, ownership and control are the only main concerns. An ideal society will have more similarities with democracy and capitalism than other forms of organization of a society.
Next Few Chapters
The chapter, Reasons for the Rich Getting Richer, outlines the reasons for the increasing wealth inequality; that is, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. It points out the significant kinds of unfairness in our monetary systems.
The chapter, Clarifying Utopia, provides clarifications about the concept of Utopia. It shows that many claims about Utopia in Utopian literature are baseless. While doing that, it outlines multiple concepts associated with an ideal society; for example, even in an ideal society, money is necessary, there will be private ownership, and there will be some wealth inequality. It also outlines the importance and urgency of fixing our monetary systems.
The highest level goal of an ideal society is to ensure the well-being of all its citizens. The chapter, Utopian Goals, expands this highest level goal to three high-level goal categories, and then outlines the systems that will fulfill those goals. The categories are: Citizen Controlled Democracy, Fair Monetary System, and Social Welfare System.