Non-Computing Projects
Around 2010 I became interested in various non-computing subjects such as politics, economics and inflation and began to read quite widely about these. The ideas which I then developed resulted in short books and in articles which are intended to stimulate one's thinking. I do not anticipate that they will be externally published widely but they can be read on this website an/or be downloaded free of charge.
Lateral Thinking in Society
has seven chapters, as follows:
Chapter 1 – Lateral Thinking
In the words of the Wikipedia article
"Lateral thinking is a manner of solving problems using an indirect and creative approach via reasoning that is not immediately obvious. It involves ideas that may not be obtainable using only traditional step-by-step logic."
Many prominent lateral thinkers are natural scientists, such as Copernicus, Archimedes, Isaac Newton, and Galileo Galilei. But lateral thinking is not confined to natural science. In this rest of this book we provide examples which show that by applying lateral thinking many normal situations in society, remarkable improvements can be gained.
Chapter 2 – Taxation
This chapter describes how taxation systems can be simplified and at the same time make tax returns unnecessary for most people.
Chapter 3 – Democracy Today
This chapter prepares the reader for the next chapter by describing some of the problems with present-day democracy.
Chapter 4 – Genuine Democracy
This chapter new form of democracy can be created which eliminates the problems described in the previous chapter, going much further than the Swiss model.
Chapter 5 – Reorganising the Business World
Here the fundamental Western business model is described and an alternative, much fairer and more equitable, business model is presented which for example eliminates the need for costly strikes and to out-source work, which also eliminates the need for stock markets and for hostile company takeovers.
Chapter 6 – Reorganising Banking
Over the centuries banking has earned a dark reputation for itself. There is much to tell about the greed of bankers but that is not the reals focus of this chapter. Instead we here concentrate mainly on inflation. The central bankers recommend that inflation should normally be around 2 % but they do not say why! It should not be allowed to be less, otherwise they see the economy as in recession. Nonsense! Only the banks and big business benefit from I look into the reasons for inflation, and discover that there are two kinds of inflation. Only one of these is significant. In the past there was a gold standard which guaranteed that inflation was rare and that fixed exchange rates between different currencies were normal. The problems began when in 1971 President Nixon abandoned the gold standard. This opened up the possibility that paper money could be printed without control.
The rest of the chapter looks into the consequences of this and into another aberrance, viz. a judgement made by Lord Cottenham in1848 that "Money, when paid into a bank, ceases altogether to be the money of the principal; it is then the money of the banker, who is bound to an equivalent by paying a similar sum to that deposited with him when he is asked for it. … The money placed in the custody of a banker is, to all intents and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with it as he pleases; he is guilty of no breach of trust in employing it; he is not answerable to the principal if he puts it into jeopardy, if he engages in a hazardous speculation; he is not bound to keep it or deal with it as the property of his principal". This opened up the possibility of the fraudulent system called fractional reserve banking, which is still the norm today. It is the cause of disastrous boom and bust business cycle, which has created chaos, for example in 1929 and in later booms. I explain a mechanism how we can reorganise banking and prevent inflation. And finally I make a proposal how digital money could be organised.
Chapter 7 – Putting it all together
This final chapter begins by discussing the issue: Where has all the money gone? It considers why the rich are becoming richer and the poor are becoming poorer. It explains for example why investors gained when women began to work, why rich Germans – with the help of politicians - gain enormously from the tax laws, how they gain from off-shore legal firms, and how the U.S Tax authorities have a special division which goes easy on the ultra-wealthy. It quotes some of the findings of Oxfam, a charity which regularly publishes information about how the richer are each year are becoming ever richer.
It then poses the question: where do we go from here? Its starting point is that the situation which has just been described is nothing less than scandalous. It adopts the viewpoint that simply taxing the superrich is not a solution but that the only way to create a fair and equitable world can only be achieved by a very radical redistribution of wealth. It then proposes a scheme which the rich would certainly consider to be grossly unfair, but on the other hand the poor would also consider unfair!
A key element in the proposal is that the banks should be abolished. They would be replaced by a single non-profit publicly owned "central bank" (in each country) which controls the currency in such a way that inflation cannot occur, viz. by ensuring that the amount of the currency is fixed. (That is how currency was formerly held under control by fixing its value to gold, because in practice the amount of gold scarcely increases.)
Appendix 1: Digital Money
As a computer scientist I considered the question of how a currency can be safely stored on computers. I do not mean how it can be represented on computers. Banks, accountants, etc. provide representations of money every day. I mean how money can actually be stored on computers. To understand what this means, you should read this Appendix. Storing money on conventional computers is not possible – also not on Monads computers. But it is possible on Speedos, as is explained in the appendix.