Synopsis and Sales Pitch

The Nut is Good Jobs for the Whole Family

Dec. 11, 2011

In 1984 government deficits, unemployment and high taxes caused a national angst in Canada and several other western countries. A form of a quiet revolt against government in general in these countries broke out. It was conducted in diplomatic language such that not everyone was aware of what was going on, only about 10% of the adult population. This went on for seven years and then it subsided. In 2002 the public in several of these countries became alarmed about a general lack of good jobs and a second revolt, or a second phase, resulted. This is modern revolution, Big Idea country, so be prepared.

In the original revolt in 1984 there were some new developments and discoveries. The deficit heated up office politics, gossip, and then a decision was made by the population to toss “private and confidential” out the window entirely. What happened is the office gossip then took the commute back to home neighborhoods, was discussed locally, and then took the reverse commute back to work from the multiplicity of infected neighbours. The effect was within a few days you could communicate the gossip in your business to a large part of the city, if it was news worthy enough. Very interestingly it was found that the repeating of the gossip could be done accurately, unlike casual gossip. Voila, large metropolitan areas became mega-villages by virtue a McLuhanesque word-of-mouth effect, commuters chatting and grouching. It’s an invasion of privacy of course.

The network of chatters then set about examining the state-of-the-union to better understand what had gone wrong, basically doing an anthropological study of modern nation states. They investigate both national issues and local issues. A social cohesiveness developed, a Borg like mass consciousness. The word-of-mouth network is a new way of protesting, because of the illegal invasion of privacy. A revolt against a government can be mounted in this fashion.

A discovery was this gossip in the context of a metropolitan area magnified people’s perceptions and understanding of personality and psychology by an order of magnitude. The community focused on certain individuals, stars, and a target individual’s personality could be dissected by the gossiping city at large, many 1000s of eyes. The result was a high degree of accuracy in understanding people and what they called “scientific intimacy”. It turns out this is a heretofore unknown ability of people, to very closely understand another person. This is what can be done with an abuse of privacy.

As it happens I was the international alpha case of the first phase of the revolt, of the scientific intimacy, and became a famous living symbol of the revolt. My life was actually given over to this role for six years and I was tortured and tormented daily by catcalls on the street of a very intimate nature. There was a key police role in this. My privacy was a public event and it was pretty awful. The cat calls were very intimate and became what I call a “mind meld”.

The McLuhanesque effects I mention of wide physical networking of gossip and of deeper understanding of personality come from people being socialized into being more concerned, basically polishing their own act. This modern social revolution emphasized individuals being better citizens, to be sure.

One does not talk about these things directly; sensitive moral and legal issues and that is why you’ll never have heard of any of this. These are facts of life and they should disturb somewhat.

As it happens after the first revolt I developed into an amateur economist and “jobs activist” and eventually wrote a fateful critique of economics and economists that outlined some unacknowledged macro economic ideas. When the new angst about jobs came along in 2002 this treatise spoke to the concern. This treatise was promulgated by the word-of-mouth network and became in fact a fillip to the renewed angst. My treatise actually activated the second revolt. I have rocked the world in my life time in this way and this new book of mine investigates the issues, describes events and asks what’s next. It’s a coincidence I was the soul and symbol of the first modern revolt but then went on to trigger a second revolt, a historic coincidence. When the second revolt started they quickly found my treatise and then located me and they actually tortured me for over another year with more cat calls, as a form of shooting the messenger. That is the story, my story. The story of this new Global Village and I are joined at the head.

While this claim of rocking the world no less sounds hard to believe the explanation is not difficult and I do it here briefly. The whole field of economics is not that well developed it turns out and there are rogue macro economic problems at work in the western world today. This is more arithmetic than alternative economics, and it’s rather amazing arithmetic at that.

Economic growth leads to better jobs normally. This is as opposed to the downward growth to McLabour which the whole West has been experiencing. Generally economists view labour markets as supply and demand but this is the simplistic picture. In fact everything is dynamic as people move around constantly and there are domino effects in the labour market that should lead to improvements.

When a good job is created a person will get hired for that position and the job they leave will be filled, typically from below. Then that new vacancy will be filled in turn from below and so on all the way down to the bottom job. In a city where people are changing jobs at a high rate this means all economic growth is connected to the worst employers by the domino effect, especially if there’s adequate on-the-job training. The de facto minimum wage is where the inflation is focused in the situation of full employment. In a tight economy there’ll be a tendency for the de facto minimum wage to gain on the median wage by supply and demand. Eventually there’ll be price increases at the bottom which will lead to contraction and bankruptcy there. Happily this has the net effect of widening the rest of the jobs market relatively. (The de facto minimum wage is what employers have to pay to get a reliable worker that shows up every day and will stay for a year.)

In fact this is the Knowledge Economy. In Asia the Tiger economies had the entire population move up the ladder of opportunity and they did so by feeding growth in good jobs by contraction at the bottom through domino effects. This is industrialization but it’s a lost theory in the West where any growth is considered the objective, even growth in McLabour. Bad growth is being fueled by population increases due to immigration to the main cities in the West. The main cities is where the economic growth tends to occur. Upward growth to better jobs is the alternative to the glib explanation that immigrants take jobs that the indigenous do not want.

There is another monster rogue idea that correcting would improve the Western world’s finances. That is the fact of hidden unemployed. In the English speaking countries 48% to 51% of the population is employed. However in the best cities the labour force has gone up to 61% but statisticians ignore this world wide. In Canadian cities at full employment the labour force has expand automatically, simply in reaction that jobs are easier to get. This is as there is a hidden reserve of people that might like a job that official surveys do not detect. The same phenomenon has been seen in the USA, the UK, Australia and New Zealand – it’s an amazing fact. Getting the hidden unemployed back to work requires management of the labour force through judicious immigration, especially in the main cities. Getting the percent of the national population working up from 51% to, say, 56% is a way of getting more revenues for the government. This could alleviate the current deficits and the coming social costs of the aging boomers. 

Upward growth would produce a more equitable minimum wage. The cost would be some inflation. However there is a list of macro economic benefits of doing this so the idea becomes popular. Note how the increase in the number of people working would cover the cost of inflation. 

Macro economics is that incomplete. The beauty of my message is it’s simple and accessible. That and there’s trillions of dollars of savings to be had world wide over the next few decades.

The second phase of the world revolt was concerned with good jobs, which is to say family, and focused on the possibility of upward growth as it’s what can be done practically. It’s broadly understood now and there’s a consensus its time has come. With continued growth, getting training right, internal migration and also the coming retirement of the baby boom cohorts there’s the potential of significantly improving the Western labour markets and this is what is at stake.

This is economics. This is how the capitalist system works. This is how society works. Some how it’s been forgotten in the West and it took me to point it out.

In the event the revolts never got any recognition from the media, academia or the world’s leaders. They have never been reported. The popular issue just now is the direction of the economy in the immigration countries. The immigration countries at this time are the traditional Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand. So the immediate audience for my message and my book is some 370 million people. A problem is the leaders themselves seem to universally have “personality issues” and can’t be alerted to the outstanding concerns about macro economics of the public. This lack of direction and lack of democracy in these countries as well as the non-existence of the reporting of the two revolts are the opportunities and the targets for my book.

The even larger issue is the new form of social revolt with the improved and polished adult personalities it developed, which is timeless. The market for that is the modern world for now, a billion people, and then, eventually, posterity.

Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.