To: Derek Darves and frequent posters, lurkers, and innocents on several mail lists. Hi Derek, If you can conveniently do so, please remove my previous post which is located just above Fig. 1 on your web site, and insert the following introductory statement. Again, my sincere thanks to you and your associates for the privilege of being a guest on your web site. Kind regards to one and all, WesBurt >>>>>>> Begin introduction to the global model <<<<<<<< WELCOME, you have found the only technically valid global model on the internet, a global model which fairly illustrates both the macro and micro aspects of the present condition of our global industrial society. This model is simple, but profound, because it addresses certain aspects of our present condition which are conspicuously missing from the content of other web sites which discuss global issues. A small sample of such impressive but incomplete web site includes: 1, <http://www.abel.co.uk/~febl/tst/frame.htm>, by Dr Diarmid Weir, 2, <http://www.kenraggio.com/>, by Ken Raggio 3, <http://www.stakes.fi/gaspp/>, by GASPP 4, <http://www.hri.org/docs/UDHR48.html>, 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 5, <http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/home.htm>, by Cliff Pickover 6, <http://www.gaia.org/ic/market/money/>, by Thomas H. Greco Jr. 7, <http://www.mind-trek.com/reports/tl10-2.htm>, by Frederick Mann Please scroll down to the lowest chart, Fig. 10 at URL <http://www.freespeech.org/darves/bert.html>. That visual-aid on the condition of the United States was drawn in 1969 from the center-fold illustration of the 166 year profile of the U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) which was included in an article on inflation in the October 1966 issue of Fortune magazine. Nothing like that center-fold profile was seen again in the U.S. print media until 1993, when authors James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg published THE GREAT RECKONING with similar price index profiles for the U.K on page 356 and for the U.S. on page 359. The CPI profile in Fig.10 shows a century of stable operation of the American economy, during which the production of goods and services expanded faster than the medium of exchange in circulation, except during war time, to cause a steady increase in the value of the U.S. dollar during peace time. The "Great Transformation," as Karl Polanyi described it in his 1944 book of that title, became perceptible in the 1890s as a sustained trend of 2-3%/year inflation and 4% to 10% unemployment which continues un-corrected to this day. The subject global model, consisting of a macro-model, Figures1 through 6 (Fig. 4 and 5 omitted), and a micro-model, Figures 7 through 9, has been evolving in my mind for about 46 years. It has its ancient roots in the corporations established in Rome in the days of King Numa, according to Emile Durkheim in his 1902 preface to the second edition of his THE DIVISION OF LABOR IN SOCIETY, and its modern roots in the practice of corporate management, not as promulgated by Peter Drucker or Paul A. Samuelson, but as practiced in the General Electric Company and in the Electric Power Industry in the 1950s. So you ask: what can the study of these greedy and powerful multi-national corporations and power-outage prone utility corporations teach us about the ongoing transformation of our world, which our poets, prophets, and philosophers call "globalization?" Well, for one thing, both our corporations and our electric power industry have evolved during the 20th century from a population of isolated businesses serving local markets to become single integrated international organizations whose members are themselves decentralized, dispersed, and diversified sovereign corporations. Both the corporation and the industry have successfully answered two vital questions about our social structure: 1, what functions of management, or government, must be centralized and held in common by all members? and, 2, what functions may be decentralized and delegated to the members? Our choice is not between "planning" and no "planning, or between Communism and Democratic-Capitalism. Instead, every stable and prosperous nation has a planned, programmed, and budgeted (non-democratic) centralized function which amounts to between 30% and 60% of the total operation (GNP), as illustrated in Fig1 at URL <http://www.freespeech.org/darves>. Among stable and prosperous corporations, however, the centralized function was 30% of annual sales in each of the ten American corporations I worked for between 1947 and 1985. If we recall that the book of Numbers in the Pentateuch (first five books of the bible) also prescribed three tithes as the proper direct tax structure for the twelve tribes of Biblical Israel, we might wonder if our corporations know something which many of our present governments have forgotten. At their present state of development, the General Electric Company (and every other equally well managed multi-national business), together with the electric power industry (no other automated industry satisfies the demand for its product in real time), are themselves perfect miniature models of, and also the building blocks of, a national or global economy. If you have seen one business enterprise, with its world market, its capital plant, its local labor market, and its workforce and their dependents as illustrated in Fig. 6 at URL <http://www.freespeech.org/darves>, you have seen every essential macro aspect of every "economy," from a family farm, to a community, a State, a Nation, or the Global economy. The micro aspects of the Global Model are illustrated by Fig. 7-9 and expanded Fig. 8, in a manner which pictures the whole workforce arranged in increasing order of the value-added by each individual member of the "economy's" workforce. Only three regulating principles are invoked to support the technical validity of this micro model: 1, Each member has a finite life-cycle, birth to death, beginning with a 16 to 26 year period of dependency upon parents and the current workforce, prior to the forty year productive period, and concluding with a second and final period of dependency on the current workforce. Children and retired people do not produce what they consume, the current workforce produces what everyone consumes, day by day. 2, The normal competitive action of the labor market will tend to bring the unit price of every kind of labor to a single unit price ($/unit of VA) as shown by the radial lines of Fig. 8 and the horizontal lines in Fig. 9. This principle operates with all mediums of exchange, from barter to gold money to paper currency to computer blips. 3, Like death and taxes, the 50/50 expense of educating and supporting dependents is an unavoidable factor in the life of each member of the workforce. This expense may be negligible for high income members, but it becomes the most significant factor for the younger and lower income members of the workforce when they are starting their families. Everybody understands the benefits of a public investment in education. Only the United Kingdom and the United States, among the industrial nations, still fail to understand the benefits of an adequate public investment in the support of dependent children, and, also fail to understand the extent to which the social order is depressed by the failure to make such an adequate public investment in the support of dependent children. And again, WELCOME, you have found the only technically valid Global Model on the internet. Sincerely yours, WesBurt >>>>>>> End introduction to the global model <<<<<<<<
