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; we have begun rethinking sexual orientation and are beginning to admit that it is not a matter of choice. 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 and mercury 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. 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.

Root Cause of Problems

Why do we have so many problems?

Many of these problems are a direct result of the lack of money to do something; that is, 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, people are 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 even lead the rich 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; for example: 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.

This scarcity of money is due to the fact that we have not yet set our monetary system fairly.

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? The rich, of course, and they are getting richer. What are its effects on the masses? Dropping labor participation rate and more unemployment; poverty for the unemployed; and inability of the poor to get out of poverty. 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 unfairness in our present-day monetary system is the root cause of most of our problems. The next chapter elaborates this unfairness.

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.

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.

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 wheels, 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.