The Generation Of Wealth by Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc.

The Generation of Wealth

Caleb Gattegno

Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc.

First published in the United States of America in 1986. Copyright © 1986-2009 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. Author: Caleb Gattegno All rights reserved ISBN 978-0-87825-190-2 Educational Solutions Worldwide Inc. 2nd Floor 99 University Place, New York, N.Y. 10003-4555 www.EducationalSolutions.com

Table of Contents Preface ........................................................................ 1 Introduction ...............................................................3 1 Finding Homo Economicus ......................................9 Awareness And The Stages Of An Individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Development........................................................................... 9 Evolution, Awareness And Homo Economicus ....................16 Energy And Homo Economicus ........................................... 20 Yields And Homo Economicus............................................. 24 Mathematics, Technology, And Homo Economicus.............27 Homo Economicus And The Commercial Uses Of The New ................................................................................ 30 Finding The Homo Economicus In Each Of Us................... 32 2 Homo Economicus In Modern History ................... 41 Funding And Time In Modern Society..................................41 Homo Economicus And Homo Sapiens ............................... 43 Homo Economicus, The Marketplace, And Social Harmony ............................................................................... 44 Homo Economicus And Social Equality .............................. 46 Homo Economicus And The Businessperson .......................47 The Science And Education Of Homo Economicus............. 52 3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth To History ............................................................. 55

Watchfulness And Energy..................................................... 56 The Symbols Of Language - An Example Of Homo Economicus At Work ............................................................ 59 Homo Economicus And The Wealth Of Property ................ 63 Homo Economicus And The Emergence Of Money............. 65 The Few Rich And The Many Poor .......................................66 New Sources Of Wealth And The Expanding Marketplace...........................................................................68 Homo Sapiens, The Renaissance, And Colonization ...........69 From Man As An Intellect To Man As A Social Being.......... 74 Living The New Social Awareness ........................................ 77 Homo Economicus, The Human Sciences, And The New Man-Made Environment ...................................................... 78 Energy And Work, Time And Work...................................... 81 Time And The Generation Of Wealth ...................................84 “Nothings” And The Generation Of Wealth .........................85 The Strands Of Our Story...................................................... 87 4 The Task Of Today ................................................. 93 Funding And Today’s Demands............................................ 93 The Earth............................................................................... 95 The Changing Character Of Employment And Wealth ........96 “Nothings” And The Future .................................................. 97 The New Entrepreneurs...................................................... 100 The Industrial Revolution, And The Commercial And Global Revolution ............................................................... 103 The Exploration Of Abundance And The Limits Of Luxury ................................................................................. 104

The Tools Of True Wealth ...................................................107 Bureaucracies, Traditions, And The Unknown...................109 Economic Experiments Of The USA And The Soviets.........111 The Haves And Have-Nots, And The Revolution Of Awareness ............................................................................ 117 The Challenge Of Homo Ecomonicus .................................120 5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education ....................................................... 123 Some Principles Of Education.............................................125 1 The Qualities Of Memory ...........................................125 2 The Commonness Of Forgetting ................................ 127 3 The Minds Of Very Young Children........................... 127 4 The Equality Of Children ...........................................129 A New Approach To Reading .............................................. 131 A New Approach To Mathematics....................................... 137 A New Approach To Nonnative Languages ........................ 147 6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy .................................................. 155 Education And Economic Progress..................................... 155 The Danger Of A Growing Surplus Of Workers ..................158 The Family And Economic Change .....................................159 Challenges, Experiments, And Education........................... 161 Robots And Automation â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Achievements Of Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, And Homo Economicus .................163 A Second Look At Education And Economic Progress ....... 167 Overpopulation And Individual Awareness........................169

The Solubility Of Italian Challenges ....................................175 7 Homo Economicus And Bureaucracy.................... 177 Bureaucracies And The Social Absolute ..............................177 Bureaucracy, Automation, And Human Solutions............. 180 The Human Value Of Automation ...................................... 183 The Death Of Bureaucracies ............................................... 185 8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth ..................189 Some Common Prejudices About Economic Evolution ..... 190 Prejudice #1 : Successful Change Always Demands A Slow Evolution Of Systems........................ 190 Prejudice #2 : Change Demands The Consciousness Of The Waking State.......................191 Prejudice #3 : The New Can Be Understood In The Framework Of The Old.................................................. 192 Prejudice #4 : The Past Should Guide The Future ....... 193 Economic Lessons Of The Recent Past............................... 194 A Ten-Year Proposal For Creating Abundance ...................197 The Wealth Of Inner Abundance....................................... 200 A Nonbureaucratic Model For Implementing The Education Of Awareness .....................................................202 The Tasks Of Governmental Leaders And Other Officials................................................................................205 Change And The Science Of Education ..............................207 9 Other Kinds Of Wealth ........................................ 209 Knowledge, The Wealth Of Homo Sapiens ........................209

Making Objects, The Wealth Of Homo Falter..................... 211 Consumption, The Wealth Of Homo Economicus..............213 The Wealth Of Experience...................................................215 Spiritual Wealth...................................................................216 The Wealth Of Cultures And Civilizations .......................... 217 The Cultural Wealth Of Art ................................................ 220 The Infinity Of Human Wealth ...........................................221 The Fifth Realm Of Evolution ............................................ 222 10 Summing Up ....................................................... 227 The Awareness Of Homo Economicus ............................... 227 History And The Experiments In Awareness..................... 228 Awareness, Education, And Change .................................. 229 Awareness And Individual Learning...................................231 Awareness And Future Wealth........................................... 232 Education, Change, And Evolution .................................... 233 “Nothings” And The Future................................................ 234 An Economics Of Plenty ..................................................... 235 Homo Economicus And The Generation Of Wealth.......... 235 Further Reading ...................................................... 237 1 Literacy .............................................................................237 2 Mathematics ................................................................... 238 3 Foreign Languages.......................................................... 240

Preface

As an educator who has also run businesses for more than thirty years, I envisaged writing this book after becoming certain that I had a practical message to transmit to my readers. The message looks practical to me because as a practical man myself involved in actions of different kinds every day of my life, I could examine my approaches and solutions and find that they belonged to a way of working that could be passed on to others. The educator in me had to establish how this could be done best for the benefit of my readers while remaining in contact with the main challenge: generating wealth. My original text was much larger than the one we are publishing. The goodwill and competence of a dedicated editor was necessary to eliminate every one of the many distractions I indulged in while writing my chapters. Mr. Harris Dienstfrey, who from 1968 through 1971 already improved considerably three of my previous books â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and currently is the editor of the review Advances: Journal of the Institute, for the Advancement

The Generation of Wealth

of Health and director of publications at the Institute — gave his time to provide this work with a form which may enhance its chances of affecting readers positively. This preface is mainly written to express my profound gratitude to Mr. Dienstfrey for what he did, starting with the raw materials of my original text and extracting from it the essential ideas, intuitions, proposals, so that they are clearly seen and understood with the minimum of effort. I’m sure that my readers would feel the same had they seen the original. Caleb Gattegno New York City June, 1986

Introduction

My thesis in this book is simple to state. We all generate wealth, but we do not all know it. Indeed, most of us do not. This lack of self-awareness is crucial. If we do not know that we do something, then we cannot explore it and become masters of it. If we are not aware of what we do, we diminish ourselves. We cannot use our understanding to extend our abilities and gain more from our powers. My aim in this book is to help readers reach the awareness that generating wealth is an inherent power, an attribute, of all humans. When enough people gain this awareness and understand it sufficiently to act on it, then people very likely will transform the social world, and problems that now seem intractable â&#x20AC;&#x201D; for example, poverty and hunger in the so-called Third World â&#x20AC;&#x201D; likely will be solved. I understand that many people (economists in particular) will find these statements outrageous. Readers of this book will judge for themselves, by which I mean they can judge the truth of my thesis that we are all generators of wealth.

The Generation of Wealth

Though my thesis is simple to state, it is not a simple thesis. And this, I am afraid, is not a simple book. It uses concepts and language that are unfamiliar and, to many, will seem odd. Yet I hope that readers will make the effort to stay with me — to put up for a while with the strangeness — for I believe that the perspective I offer here provides a new and hopeful way to understand individual experience and our common position in the world. For when I talk about the generation of wealth, while I refer to money, I also refer to something more — to the possibility of improving the “yields” in all our activities. How can I say that we are all generators of wealth? What do I mean when I say that to generate wealth is an attribute of human beings? These questions are best answered by considering two other human attributes — knowing and making. Today, we take for granted that everyone is capable of knowing and of making or doing. But it was not always so. In the case of knowing, it had been presumed during most of human history that only a small, select group were capable of systematically applying themselves to the task of learning. This view — we might also call it a prejudice — changed about 500 years ago, giving rise, among other events, to the explosion known as the Renaissance. Since that time, it has become clear to almost everyone that all human beings can learn. And today we have created institutions whose explicit purpose is to instill in all young people the skills of reading and writing and arithmetic. (The success of these institutions is another matter.) In other words no one now doubts that Man is a knower, and that knowing is, as I call it, an attribute of human beings. Indeed, we have given this attribute a label. When we call Man a

Introduction

Homo Sapiens, we refer to Man as a knower. (Zoologists, as is typical of many contemporary scientists, prefer to talk of outward and therefore presumably “objective” characteristics, and say that Homo Sapiens is a being with a certain posture, skull size, and so forth. As we shall see, it is not outer form but inner awareness that leads to an understanding of human activities in the world.) Much of the same sequence of developments holds for the recognition of Man as a maker or doer. For most of human history, most human beings have not seen themselves or been regarded as creatures of action who could transform the environment. They saw themselves rather as creatures who carried on certain fixed ways of acting in the world (ways that, of course, originally had to be invented by one or many people). But the widespread recognition of the Homo Sapiens in human beings quickly gave rise to the widespread recognition that human beings could act, create, invent — did not need to accept the environment as a given but in fact could alter it to suit human needs and desires. Man is a knower, but he is also a maker or doer. And we have also given this attribute a label — Homo Faber. Historically speaking, the recognition by (most) human beings that they were capable of knowing and capable of doing has transformed the world. Once Man became aware of the part of himself that is Homo Sapiens, he created the sciences, that vast and growing body of knowledge that codifies Man’s understanding of the universe. (Elsewhere, in conscience de la conscience I have argued that Man can only manifest the science of his own awareness. In other words, the sciences represent

The Generation of Wealth

Man’s various ways of knowing himself knowing. Within this perspective, I succeeded in unifying all the sciences, showing how each relates to the others while retaining the uniqueness of each.) Similarly, once Man became aware of the part of himself that is Homo Faber, he proceeded to create the man-made world that surrounds us and continues to change and expand, enlarging our powers almost daily. Let me put this argument in a few sentences. At a fairly recent point in human history, Man became engrossed with the exploration of the knowledge that we call the sciences. At a somewhat more recent point, he became engrossed with the actions aimed at transforming the environment. My argument is that these great developments were possible only because Man had come to understand that he — meaning everyone — could know and had the power to alter the environment to make something new. Inner awareness made these developments happen and not so-called historical forces that somehow operate without human will. Inner awareness is the source of human mastery of the world. In this book, I try to call attention to another attribute of human beings, one not yet generally perceived, though all of us display it in our activities, just as all of us display the attributes of knowing and making, even if we are not aware of them. This “new” attribute — new to our awareness not to our reality — concerns itself with yields, with the relation between what we put into an activity and what we get out of it. This is the attribute that led to such concepts as efficiency and improvement, and to such notions as “time is money” and “spending our time wisely.” This is the attribute that focuses on

Introduction

economics in all its meanings and that makes us all generators of wealth. Following the pattern established by the labels Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber, I have borrowed the name of Homo Economicus for this attribute. This book tries to make clear that Homo Economicus is in all of us, and that an understanding of this attribute will enable us to become masters of the economic world to a degree never before imagined and masters of the economy of our own lives as well. In the first portions of the book, I explore individual and historical experiences that reveal Homo Economicus at work and that thus help us to become aware of it. Next, I show how important challenges in education can be resolved if we draw on the powers of Homo Economicus. Finally, I apply our studies to major, seemingly intractable problems of the world economy â&#x20AC;&#x201D; primarily, poverty in the developing nations. One final point needs to be raised before we begin. What are my credentials for writing a book about the generation of wealth? The answer does not lie in the money I have made during my life. I am in my mid-70s, and I am not a wealthy person, although it is possible for me to imagine that I might have become wealthy in a number of the ways by which people amass large sums of money. I refer to ways that involve a generation of wealth. To win a lottery, to inherit a fortune (in money or other valuables), to marry a wealthy person who is willing to bring his or her fortune to the marriage â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all these ways of amassing wealth have nothing to do with generating wealth, our subject here.

The Generation of Wealth

Still, I do not write this book to explain how to become wealthy engaging in one or more of the activities that do involve the generation of wealth. I have spent my working life as an educator, seeking solutions to basic problems of learning. I write, then, as an educator, who has systematically analyzed the pivotal place of awareness in learning. One way to describe this book is as an exercise for readers in self-awareness with regard to the subject of wealth and its generations. The value of this educational enterprise is that it can change radically the appearance of the world and of our powers within it.

1 Finding Homo Economicus

In this chapter, we examine the activities and experiences that help put us in touch with economic realities â&#x20AC;&#x201D; realities that we conceptualize in notions like yields and efficiency. As we explore these activities, we will reach for the insights and intuitions that reveal the attribute of Man I have named Homo Economicus. In this quest, we do best to begin, as we did in the Introduction, by examining the first attributes of Man that we have identified, Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber. Our initial focus is the individual and the activities that reveal the presence of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber and the awareness of their presence. We need to pull together several seemingly disparate threads before we can begin to find Homo Economicus.

Awareness And The Stages Of An Individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Development Humans need to know, and they begin very early in their development to use the particular ways of knowing that are

The Generation of Wealth

available to them. That chronologically they are “babies” does not mean that they have available to them only “baby” ways of knowing. Quite the contrary. Babies learn as they do, gaining awareness of their bodies, mastering the skills of movement and of language, precisely because they have powerful ways of knowing. The first of these approaches is perception. Proprioception, recognition of stimuli within the body, is at work before birth and for most people continues till an individual’s death. Perception is needed as soon as one is born, and once a baby is secure in its vegetative functions in the new environment, this way of knowing moves to the senses, to educate them so that they can be sure of what they perceive. I have developed these points at length in other works. Here, to illuminate the kind of observations I am making, perhaps it suffices to say that babies must train their perception to distinguish, for example, objects that are alive and can move from those that are fixed. This distinction is not a given. A baby must discover it and master it. Soon, a second way of knowing, action, is integrated with perception, widening it. Nonetheless, for four or five years, perception remains central to the child, and action is subordinated to it. Then the reverse takes place, and for a few years action is the young person’s main way of knowing, as is illustrated by the involvement in games (of marbles and ball, hopscotch, etc.) and in drawings. As a result of the close association between perception and action, young humans cannot quite distinguish what comes from the knower or the doer in them. They live both, normally using them to know and to produce, and they do not take on the study of their

1 Finding Homo Economicus

perceptions, actions, thoughts, and feelings — a study that would lead them to an awareness of how they meet the challenges of the world. Their lives are naturally full, and indeed there barely is enough time to pursue all the projects they create for themselves in addition to pursuing the projects put before them by others. In adolescence, in a third way of knowing, through affectivity, the universe of emotions, feelings and sentiments comes to the fore. Perception now mainly concerns itself with processing the inner energy of emotions and feelings, whereas earlier individuals primarily dealt with the energy that came from the outer world of perception or was expended through their actions to affect the environment. In fact, most adolescents become so inwardly oriented that their outward action is reduced mainly to the routines of earlier years. For most adolescents actions are distractions for a while. So much is boiling within them, and so many strange inner energy movements call for their attentive presence. At this stage of individual development, we can say that Homo Sapiens is mobilized to know the invisible universes, while Homo Faber develops the mental capacity of working with images instead of things well beyond its use in earlier stages of development. What I am talking about here is the adolescents’ preference for dreaming over actual physical actions. With their dreams and daydreaming, adolescents use the power of virtual actions to work on releasing affective energy, to learn what it is and how it behaves under one’s command. The somatic changes of puberty contribute their input to this development, and adolescents soon no longer care to be what they have been for the past few years, they begin to yearn to be something else. In

The Generation of Wealth

their outward behavior, they now tend to act in ways that are troublesome to themselves and sometimes to their family. The time that adolescents, more or less in turmoil, spend exploring the affective domain shapes their broad relationships to the human and natural environments and gives them a chance to generate their own outlook on life. Many may soon abandon their outlook, but there are some who develop their vocations at the end of adolescence. In any event, adolescents, as they generate this outlook, do not ask of themselves that they be realistic; instead, they simply disregard all obstacles and create for themselves a future packed with their own projections. This imagined future then comes to function as a screen for their past, reducing it to a certain number of memories that they keep alive, while they lay the larger portion of it to rest in their subconscious. As the live memories blend with their affective dynamics, adolescents become young men or young women seeking to enter the adult world. In our time, the adult world offers both an intellectual universe and a social universe, two spheres that are not quite separable from each other but which are strongly experienced as being sharply separate. In contemporary societies, classes come into being on the basis of whether one enters the intellectual universe of the adult world — the track of college and education — facing few social responsibilities for the next four or five years, or is thrust upon the jungle of the social universe — the track of getting a job and earning an income — without the means of making sense of it. The movement into the adult world brings us to an important point in our search for the Homo Economicus in each of us. When individuals move into the

1 Finding Homo Economicus

intellectual or social universe, they encounter, often without realizing it, the world of choice, of being who they want to be. How they realize their choices, direct their activities and energies to one or more ends, involves the Homo Economicus in them. As adolescents, people for the most part are totally powerless over the intellectual and social environment in which they find themselves. The only area in which they can exert any control is in the environment of the family, where they learned the broad patterns of either conviviality or blackmail and threat but rarely the reasons for why their family exists. In any event, rarely are young men and women given the means to understand life or the opportunity to find the means by themselves. The result is that most of us grow up unaware that we are Homo Sapiens or Homo Faber, that our own powers give us the capacity to know and to do, and that we have many choices for making a life for ourselves through the study of reality. We come to believe instead that all we did at the levels of perception, action, and feeling somehow was done by others and somehow was given by them to us. Thus, when we enter the social environment of the adult world, we are incomparably more conditioned by our experiences there than when we were children and young adolescents, when our own self-knowledge was our surest guide. As little as is done to enable the members of the young generation to see themselves as Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber, near to nothing is done to enable them to see themselves as Homo Economicus. In deprived environments, survival is the predominant concern; the outer force of necessity seems to rule all decisions. In well-to-do environments, youngsters have no

The Generation of Wealth

notion of what they would need to do to produce by themselves the sort of life they matter-of-factly lead. In the so-called middle-class environments, neither the efforts of the hard working parents, who know the limitations of their earnings, nor the restrictions felt by the young (the result, they believe, of arbitrary decisions by the parents) concern the wider reality in which all are plunged. Only rarely do individuals realize that their powers include the capacity to improve the yields of their activities, financial and otherwise. Why does this matter? Am I just seeking to elaborate one more distinction to give readers some intellectual amusement? This is certainly not my objective. The advanced societies of modern nations are so complex that all the citizens who have not been given the means to remain in contact with complexity and who lack the special gifts to compensate for this failing (true of most people) can only be lost. And if most people are lost, as today is the case, then what can we hope to achieve? Without the proper intellectual equipment, we cannot enter upon the complexities of our worlds, the accumulation over centuries of many unplanned events by people who did their best but who perhaps did not always do what was needed. Without a proper understanding of social dynamics, all we can do is see reality through preconceptions and unjustified projections. This story of ordinary development is the story, then, of development without awareness. That people are Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber is simply assumed, given, and not explored deliberately, consciously. Even scientists and philosophers, who work at being Homo sapiens, take for granted that the children of Homo Sapiens are automatically Homo Sapiens, that active

1 Finding Homo Economicus

mastery of the powers of knowing is somehow available of its own accord. Similarly with Homo Faber, and the skills that tend to be passed on from one generation to another while few of us feel any obligation to penetrate more deeply into our capacity to do â&#x20AC;&#x201D; which is to say, to create our environment. Instead, the drive to do becomes the product of either the need to know or of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s involvement in pre-existing activities that others regard as contributions to the community. Homo Faber the human capacity thus become Homo Faber the servant of the community, doing what every grownup in a particular culture or group does: picking fruit, leading cattle, learning a skill to be exercised for an exchange of money, and so on. My argument can be summed up by saying that unless there is a special awareness, no one recognizes that he or she is Homo Sapiens or Homo Faber. But whenever such an awareness does strike, then a certain reality is revealed, and one no longer doubts that he or she has always been Homo Sapiens or Homo Faber, and that being one or both is, in fact, a human birthright. In modern societies, our intellectual education leads us to mostly philosophical studies that engage and develop the Homo Sapiens in us, to the point that we rarely recognize any other human condition. It is Homo Sapiens who then discovers Homo Faber in himself or herself, and sees that Homo Faber is the part of the self that enacts the actions of Homo Sapiens. Put differently, Homo Sapiens finds the ways of working that Homo Sapiens will attribute to the Homo Faber in oneself. Later in this study, we shall examine educational techniques that can help

The Generation of Wealth

students find the Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber in themselves and go on to discover as well the Homo Economicus.

Evolution, Awareness And Homo Economicus We do not learn everything at once. Although everyone would agree with this proposition, very few take it seriously enough to examine its meaning. The proposition can be put another way. We learn some things before we learn others. The question is: Why? We can conceptualize human evolution as a succession of experiments in knowing. This perspective enables us to identify the meaning in the histories of different collectivities, and to learn from these histories what can be done over time in the particular activity to which a collectivity devoted itself. Consider the attempt to colonize a country — say, Spain’s effort to colonize Holland in the 16th century. Is it not appropriate to regard this endeavor as a human experiment to uncover the techniques of colonization and the difficulties and dangers of colonizing other areas of the world? The colonizers’ experiences with these dangers revealed to them how they might overcome or avoid such problems and how much they could demand of the local populations, who were taken for granted until they rebelled. I use colonization as an example because it is an expression of Homo Economicus — the effort to increase one’s yields — and because it has helped create the world we see around us today, with its enormous economic problems and its extraordinary interconnectedness.

1 Finding Homo Economicus

The experiments of colonization cover a definite segment of chronological time, and if we study this period, the experiments can teach us what made them possible and what ended them. The circumstances of the latter differed in different situations. The South American colonies, for example, freed themselves violently from the decadent power that Spain had become in the 19th century. India, on the other hand, freed itself under a conjunction of circumstances: a weak idealistic government that came to power in the United Kingdom in 1945 after an exhausting Second World War, and the prolonged disobedience, baffling to the British colonizers, of the non-violent movement that Gandhi started at the end of the First World War and led for over 30 years. Today, in the almost non-colonial earth that emerged after the 1960s, we contemplate the experiments of a multitude of once-colonial countries now trying to justify their existence in the practical terms of economics and administration, while their very appearance had their roots in the visionary, the passionate desire, expressed politically, to change the map of the earth. Consider a more recent historical experiment that has direct bearing on the economic situation of the contemporary world, the â&#x20AC;&#x153;intellectualâ&#x20AC;? experiment, initiated by Karl Marx, to see historical events as the product of economic forces. Marx and his followers regard economic forces as comparable to forces of nature, nourished by themselves and able to translate their historical metabolism into the events of the day. Like forces of nature, economic forces presumably follow laws that often are amenable to our precise and definite understanding, but sometimes are beyond our grasp and are totally unpredictable, like an earthquake that swallows or creates an island. While

The Generation of Wealth

events could be seen, observed, and described, their causes could not always be followed or found. Two events that Marx foretold were the inevitable replacement of the capitalist order by a socialist society (because of the ever-increasing numbers of the proletariat and the constant reduction of the capitalists by their own ruthless competition and mutual elimination) and the withering of the Communist State. The work of Homo Sapiens is central in this interpretation of human life on earth. Human action is only incidental in the Marxist perspective, which places the causes of historical events outside of humans. Marxâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s theory does not even see the Homo Faber in its own maker. Aided by his study of Hegelian theorizing, Marx found it much easier to superimpose on his reading of history past and present, a system of mental constructs in which humans are schema manipulated by events, themselves the products of forces directed, as if on automatic pilot, by their own momenta and energies. Humans are pawns moved about by non-human forces. In the physical world, people are of course very much present. Sometimes they even have ears to hear the summons to unite and the consciousness to recognize their situation and to act, a characteristic that enables them to come out of the dehumanizing and debasing condition in which workers exist. But for the most part Marx attributes the capacity of consciousness only to creative minds in the world of the arts, and then only when these minds are engaged in their creative work. Thus even the most influential of all writers on economic history does not seem to suspect that there may be a source of enlightenment to understand oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s place in history within every person. For Marx, such

1 Finding Homo Economicus

enlightenment can only come from a theory — from something outside the person. The argument of this book is that it has now become possible to look at economics in a way that places it squarely within the domain of human control. In our present world, it is certainly possible to feel helpless before the magnitude of the tasks that face us and the imminence of dangers that threaten us, and to see the individual as worthless and institutions, particularly states and governments, as overwhelmingly potent. Yet even in this situation, there remain some stones unturned, some paths unexplored, some attributes of human beings not yet examined, which suggest that we may yet have the resources to deal properly with the problems of our day. In addition to the Homo Sapiens, who knows, and the Homo Faber, who does, there is a third “being,” Homo Economicus, who asks questions that neither of the other two raise. For example, what can one do to reach a deeper acquaintance of oneself as a person who changes the world and history? This question, which reverses Hegel and Marx’s perspective, is not just a statement with a vaguely inspiring implication but an answerable challenge. In meeting this challenge, we shall have reason to explore another question that may appear strange and quite unrelated to the subject before us: “What is the role of ‘nothings’ — phenomena with relatively low amounts of energy — in the fabric of our human world?” If such a role exists, then it may be that individuals, who in most theories of history and change basically amount to nothing, will gain new significance and perhaps a decisive place in the shaping of the world in which they live.

The Generation of Wealth

Energy And Homo Economicus So far I have sought to discuss the human attributes of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber in a way that will make the reality of a Homo Economicus easier to grasp, and I have introduced certain aspects of time and evolution that will help illumine our exploration of Homo Economicus. In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss the emergence of several concepts, intellectual developments, and technical changes, all prominent in our contemporary lives, that are expressions of the Homo Economicus in Man. To see these developments in the proper light is to see the reality, scope, and power of the capacity within us that I call Homo Economicus. I begin this survey with a consideration of the nature of energy. The awareness of energy is a very recent achievement of Homo Sapiens, and one very much needed by Homo Faber. In western civilization, a major source of this awareness, from the 16th century on, has been human work. Much earlier, of course, Man had recognized certain properties of energy, but it took centuries to become aware of and to conceptualize the idea of energy. As we trace the history of the understanding and emerging awareness of energy, we trace a history that manifests more and more the dynamics of Homo Economicus and simultaneously points to the reality of its presence. Humans recognized quite early that the muscular energy they used in many actions â&#x20AC;&#x201D; particularly the actions that took a lot of physical energy â&#x20AC;&#x201D; was also present in and used by animals. It was this insight that led humans to invent the domestication of

1 Finding Homo Economicus

animals to make the energy of animals available for human use, adding it to their own. There are other early examples of Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s understanding of energy. Before the domestication of animals, Man had to make edible substances that were too hard to be consumed raw. Humans used fire to cook. Humans also discovered energy in elasticity, which led them to construct bows that could throw arrows far enough to capture game that had been beyond their reach. Humans went on to discover other tools to make possible actions that human labor alone could not easily perform. For example, the lever in all its forms enabled humans to conquer the space around them, through traps to catch bigger game, canals to water the fields, carts to transport the harvest, and so forth. Now, such discoveries and the realization of them have been the joint work of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber. But there is a component of this work that cannot be attributed to either Homo Sapiens or Homo Faber â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the motive, the desire to do the work better, more efficiently, more speedily, more economically. Something beyond Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber was working in human beings (and not in animals, it should be noted, only in humans), leading to the awareness in some that it was possible to increase work output not just by adding more quantity, as was done through animal domestication and through slavery (a kind of human domestication), but also by changing the methods of work, to get more for less. To achieve better yields, humans tried and adopted such techniques as breeding and as selecting seeds, methods that in terms of energy used only the small amount of human labor involved in thinking of them and trying them out.

The Generation of Wealth

The progress gained through such separate, individual awarenesses was noticed and exploited, but they did not seem to require that humans reach a deeper level of more comprehensive awareness. Instead, a human discovered something and knew that it would open one or more new uses of an existing energy, with the result that more could be achieved, perhaps more quickly and even with new attributes that could make the outcome useful to larger numbers of people. Thus, it became possible to use labor and fire to extract metals out of their chemical compounds in the soil, and generations then devoted themselves to replacing stone tools with much more efficient metal tools. The short moment of intuition that illuminated this discovery was lost in the long period of time needed to expand it and enable the discovery to reach its full expanse. Homo Faber, helped in different ways for different instances by Homo Sapiens, had taken over and prevailed. The discoveries leading to better yields from less energy were so numerous that millennia were absorbed in translating them into objects and sets of objects, organized to serve newly perceived needs or opportunities. New uses of energy entered every area of life. Hannibal could use the animal energy of elephants to invade Italy (a feat that still leaves us incredulous, happening when it did), but the Roman use of horse-drawn chariots â&#x20AC;&#x201D; animal energy transformed into offensive platforms on wheels â&#x20AC;&#x201D; enabled the Romans to gain the edge over most of their enemies for some time. Humans have never ceased transforming their relationship to their environment, natural and human, by acting upon energy, making it more available, in larger quantities, and for a greater variety of uses.

1 Finding Homo Economicus

A special moment in the history of energy came during the 18th century in Europe. For over a hundred years a number of individuals had been studying what has become known as mechanics, and in the 18th century, some of these “mechanical engineers” mastered the kinetic energy of steam, produced by using fire to heat water in a container with one moving side. The invention of the steam engine made possible the first industrial revolution, the term given to the period of history in which there was an accelerated application of the steam engine to all sorts of things — textile mills, locomotives, ships. It should be noted that electricity was discovered almost at the same time as steam, but almost a century passed before electricity joined steam engines to expand the dominance of humans over their environment. Then, early in the 19th century, some signs of a new awareness became evident. A few people explicitly asked questions about getting more for less, mainly in regard to the still newly discovered energy of the steam engine. The important word yield entered the common vocabulary, and a French engineer, Carnot, made the then astonishing statement that the yield of a steam engine depended only on the difference between the temperature of the heat source and that of the milieu where the steam coming from the engine escaped. Only if that difference were increased would one get more energy from a steam engine. No other factor, Carnot declared, not the size of the engine, the distance the piston traveled, the surface of the piston, or nature of the cylinder, would affect the yield. With Carnot’s work began a concentrated effort to achieve higher and higher yields. For our purposes here, this particular example evokes the special preoccupation that began with the original challenge of

The Generation of Wealth

looking at the steam engine and has spread and spread to what it has become today, a central preoccupation of almost everyone to “get the most” from any investment of one’s time, energy, or money. It is the presence of this historically new component in the ordinary course of our thinking that I want to stress. For it is dramatic evidence that many people, whether or not they are conscious of it, have found in themselves, in addition to Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber, the presence of Homo Economicus. Indeed, it is Homo Economicus that allows us to create modern commercial societies, everywhere, independently of local history, and explains why this is happening at this point in history and did not happen earlier.

Yields And Homo Economicus The notion of yields did not of course spring into being solely with the advent of the steam engine. As we already have suggested in passing, the effort to increase yields was present in the act of whipping animals and slaves so that they would prefer the strain of an extra effort to the pain of the lash. But a clear awareness of the value of increased yields in most transactions is quite new, and is still not experienced by many people, even some in economic positions. I have in mind the civil servants who are willing to be idle instead of serving the public, and shall examine this situation in a later chapter on bureaucracy. Yield has gained importance when certain new problems presented themselves — for instance, when the Pharaohs

1 Finding Homo Economicus

wanted to build large structures like the temples at Karnak or the Pyramids of Giza. The Pharaohs encountered many difficult engineering problems, from locating enormous stone blocks of equal sizes, to transporting them to the building sites, to erecting them one on top of the other. In such situations, yield means obtaining a result in a certain period of time with the available labor and machinery. Yield took on another meaning when the issue was one of finding the resources to pay for those adventurous undertakings that demanded travel over vast and relatively unknown distances. The Crusades are one example; the task of creating ships to face the long journeys and unknown odds of discovering the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s geographical reality five hundred years ago, another. Yield had yet another meaning when the issues concerned taxes and the right balance between the level of taxation and the ability of people to pay: too high a level of taxes could lead the people to rebel, preferring death in the service of fairness than under the weight of injustice. With the advances of physics in the last two centuries, yield has gained a more precise meaning. Scientists have looked at what was spent in money and effort to generate a certain result, comparing the result to the investment. The ratio of result to investment came to be seen as a fraction that could never exceed one, with the yield getting better as the ratio approached one. The effort to approach one became the basis of industrial progress, and the ratio became a way to measure the likely

The Generation of Wealth

success of competitors. Research leading to higher yields, once started, would not stop. The interest on loans by individuals or institutions to other individuals or institutions, is called the yield of the money, which the lender wants to increase and the borrower wants to reduce. The borrower also sometimes considers the cost of the loan’s yield in terms of his own investment in an enterprise. In the city of London, the 19th century slogan, “Time is money,” became an incentive for moneymakers to become aware of how they used their time. Watchfulness of one’s time is very modern, and the concept of exchanging an investment of time for increasing yields of money is very modern too. With the concept of yield came the new notion of risk. During the last two centuries, these two ideas have been intermingled in many situations, perhaps most centrally in the operations of the vast insurance business. Insurance companies quantified the relationship between yield and risk, and using actuarial methods and studies determined the amount to ask from people who wanted to be insured against the risk of major losses. That insurance companies (who generally present themselves as providing a public service) became very rich and powerful financially proved that their actuarial calculations brought them a yield far beyond the actual risks of the insured. In the next chapter, we will consider the place of Homo Economicus in our commercial societies. Here it is enough to say that although the awareness of Homo Economicus had not

1 Finding Homo Economicus

yet become explicit, it often transformed the involvements of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber, leading to dramatically new understandings of yield. Consider the now common recognition that with certain investments one’s principal can produce yields that leave the original investment intact. In other words, it has become apparent that some people in some circumstances can have their cake and eat it too. Further, this situation blatantly contradicts the scientific principle of conservation that “nothing is lost and nothing is created, that all is only transformed from one form to another.” As we shall see, it is precisely because the generation of wealth can involve the creation of a result far in excess of the original investment, that its dynamics are not reducible to the generations studied in physics and the other exact sciences. As we also can see, the scientists in those disciplines use their own Homo Economicus — even if they wish to be pure Homo Sapiens — and they sometimes create vast changes in the world out of the “nothingness” of ideas. It is because these scientists focus on Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber that they do not perceive the new awareness expressed in Homo Economicus.

Mathematics, Technology, And Homo Economicus Despite the disinclination of scientists in the so-called hard sciences to perceive the awareness of Homo Economicus, we can find two trends among scientists of the last two centuries (and especially during the last half century) indicating the presence of this awareness and its increasing importance.

The Generation of Wealth

One trend has been the growing use of mathematics in science. Mathematics expresses the work of Homo Economicus in several ways. Mathematicians do their work on models constructed by and for themselves, with the aim of producing something new through their thoughts and marks on paper. The yields from thinking (the work of Homo Sapiens) and from the elaboration of their thought according to the laws of logic (which is to say, the mechanics of thinking â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the work of Homo Faber) are together judged in terms of whether they simplify and generalize the data, in short, produce something that is more economical than what existed at the outset. Such a result is not foreseen in any definite manner, but it is accepted as the yield of the work â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a disguised recognition of the still not explicit Homo Economicus. When the yield is as economical as the mathematician can make it, it is generally accompanied by an awareness that it is elegant and functional. The aesthetic appreciation of economy which accompanies some transformations of data is a sure sign that Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber have been guided by Homo Economicus, looking from the side surreptitiously. Is searching for economy in thought not a clear indication that we are guided by more than the need to know and the need to do? And is this testimony to the presence of Homo Economicus not an additional reason to grapple with the task of determining what makes the Homo Economicus in us? The revolutionary perceptions that filled so many of the scientific enquiries and investigations over the past one hundred fifty years, leading to the remarkable technological accomplishments that we take for granted today, is the second

1 Finding Homo Economicus

trend revealing the implicit awareness of Homo Economicus in the sciences of the last centuries. Consider as only one example the investigations of electricity and its incorporation into a whole new body of increasingly efficient technology. In the 19th century, Faraday succeeded in generating currents in wires by electromagnetic induction. A few decades later, the induced current gave rise to the electric dynamo and the electric motor, making available large quantities of electric energy. People using steam (or heat) energy in engines had been very pleased when yields equaled 25 percent; with electric engines, they managed yields of up to 80 percent. As we saw earlier, yields became measures of efficiency, and most of the creative minds during the first industrial revolution in Europe, and later in the United States, had the goal of higher yields in all the improvements they proposed for production methods in all sorts of factories. Indeed, improvement was synonymous with greater yields, and both meant greater economic profits and benefits. A wave of inventiveness swept Europe, generating a constantly increasing number of ways of doing differently what had been done before or of doing for the first time what had never been done or even been contemplated before.

The Generation of Wealth

Homo Economicus And The Commercial Uses Of The New With the surge of new inventions, new ways of doing things steadily replaced old ways that proved inadequate, and steadily created new opportunities. In these developments we can see that the new is not built on the old but rather that the new transforms the old at the same time that it reveals new paths into the future. Sailships became acceptable for sports but were no longer adequate for their former functions as freight carriers or warships. Sails were replaced by coal-heated steam engines, which later were replaced by engines using liquid fuels and electric rotary motors. These changes led to the construction of huge tankers to crisscross the high seas, which of course had important effects on the scope and expansion of trade. Each new advance, in whatever area, retained from old formats only those elements that were compatible with the new inventions. In ships, for example, the principles of floating give hulls the enduring shape of a stationary whale and the principles of propulsion indicated the unchanging need for rotary propellers that press on the sea water to generate a forward push. On the other hand, when boats could be fitted with steam engines, creating boiler rooms where burning fuels were heating water into steam to provide the energy of propulsion, the unpredictability of the winds that were the source of energy in sailboats no longer was a concern. When internal combustion engines made steam obsolete, the newly increased energy led to

1 Finding Homo Economicus

all sorts of advances, greater speed being only one. Comfort, even luxury, and increased space for freight now made sea voyages attractive to tourists as well as to maritime companies, who could also realize greater profits through the increased number of trips per month. In sum, many people working separately were affecting every aspect of life, and behind their efforts was a single common goal: doing better financially in a particular area of commercial activity. Amidst the increasing complications of the world of trade, it became clear that individuals needed to concentrate their endeavors, they needed to become specialized students of their activities, for at first, only trial and error were available. The industrial barons of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th specialized in the tasks of creating industrial empires, and those who prevailed were the ones who learned quickly. Once some problems were solved, successors could start from there and solve other problems. Delegating responsibilities in one’s field of work made available more minds to handle more components of the overall task. “Corporations” emerged as the answer to meeting the larger challenges of organization. That these bodies are still called “societies” in the countries using romance languages (and in Germany as well) and called “companies” in Britain and its old Commonwealth, shows unequivocally that everywhere it was taken for granted that to keep a business going meant involving as many people as were necessary.

The Generation of Wealth

Humans created new businesses in their desire to go beyond the task of meeting the needs of survival. Insurance companies, saving and loan associations, pension schemes, brokerage firms, all epitomize the changes that have brought an end to the principle of the “survival of the fittest.” One of the functions of the trade union movement has been to show their members that their world no longer resembles, in effect, the realm of the fish, where the smaller serve as prey to the larger. All this is the achievement of Homo Economicus. But this achievement is sometimes treated as if it were imperishable. In the United States today, for example, one hears the phrase “job security” in disputes between corporation managers and trade unionists. How can people believe that job security can be granted by an employer whose own security cannot be guaranteed? The achievements of Homo Economicus have, in fact, created vast problems for the world. We have “muddled through” to the present. The issue we face, which this book seeks to resolve, is whether we can reach the awareness of our own dynamics to enable us to move more consciously and deliberately into the future.

Finding The Homo Economicus In Each Of Us In this closing section of the first chapter, my intention is to lay out some exercises that readers can use to become aware of the Homo Economicus in themselves.

1 Finding Homo Economicus

Each of us has only a small number of direct experiences, and each of us, to a greater or lesser extent, increases that number by proxy, through reading about an experience or watching a movie or listening to others. In becoming aware of a vast world out there — a world about which I know so little and shall most probably never know enough — I can open myself to different ways of knowing, and so make my passage on earth as compatible as possible with my irreducible ignorance of the details of the lives of billions of people now alive. One of these ways of knowing is the one that lets me know I am a Homo Sapiens, a being capable of knowing, and a Homo Faber, a being capable of doing, and not simply a person who knows certain things and does or make certain things. To reach this more general state of knowledge detaches me from the details of a particular activity, intellectual or material, and takes me closer to the person involved in the activity, makes me aware of my various awarenesses and of the dynamics present in my involvements. These awarenesses and dynamics are no less real than the outcomes of my thinking or my actions. On the contrary, they may be more real, because in perceiving them, I reach something in me that is deeper, more myself than the varying components accompanying the contents of any particular activity. Once I learn to look at things within while I think or I act, I establish in myself the constant presence of a self who is Homo Sapiens or Homo Faber — establish in my self the knower who is in touch with the dynamics of knowing or the maker who is in touch with the dynamics of making. Once seen, these facets of the self are not present as a concept but as energy at work on itself. I become the one who then can say to himself: “You are the one who knows, who is aware, who has

The Generation of Wealth

awareness of the self attending to an activity and who maintains that awareness for a period of time, perhaps for the rest of your life.” At that point Homo Sapiens or Homo Faber has descended into the concreteness of one’s life and will not leave. It is possible also to reach that deep component of oneself that I call Homo Economicus. One technique for doing this is to present ourselves with questions to answer. The questions are about ourselves, and we must confront them seriously and answer them as deliberately and as fully as we can. Because we can stress and ignore, we pass through life noticing some things and completely overlooking others. It is these dual possibilities that generate the enormous variety in human lives. In the same surroundings one of us can be struck by something that the others see nothing of. In terms of Homo Economicus, so long as we have not focused our minds on our involvements in economic life, we may simply pass through them without awareness until one or another involvement takes an unexpected turn — when we lose our job, for instance, or inherit an unexpected fortune. To see our particular individual place in the local, regional, national, and world economies, we must educate our awareness. The following questions (others could be added) must be answered personally by each reader. If the answers come readily, the feedback — insight into the presence of Homo Economicus — is immediately available. If the answers come slowly or do not come at all, more time and attention is needed to reach the findings that can generate new awarenesses. The

1 Finding Homo Economicus

validity of the questions is established by their capacity to expand the understanding of those who consider them. Their fertility is found in the continuing alertness they generate in one about the matters they raise, until the person sees that it costs nothing to remain with these issues — at which point, the person can say, “I really am a Homo Economicus.” We start with a question whose answer connects each individual to economic life. The questions are grouped so as to highlight different aspects of the connection. *** Do I have needs? How do I take care of them? Do I count on other people to take care of my needs? How do other people do it? Do all of them have the same motives? Are there people who satisfy my needs but do not think of me personally? What do they get for meeting my needs? Who meets their needs? Since I have a number of needs, which of them are essential? What needs are less important, non-essential?

The Generation of Wealth

Can I turn to the same people to satisfy both types of needs? Are my needs like those of others? Is this true of all my needs or only of my essential needs? Do the people who have the same needs all turn to the same sources to satisfy them? Do such people constitute a reachable group which the sources of satisfaction want to serve? Does this situation change the group into customers and the sources into suppliers? What is easier today, to define needs or to define sources of products and groups of customers? If I look at myself as a customer (because I have needs, essential and non-essential) can I see the extent to which my sources depend on me for their existence? Is it easier to think of customers — who, by definition are anonymous, a group with a need — than to think of individual people? Does bypassing the personality of people and concentrating on them as customers make the work of suppliers any easier? How? What consequences follow from the fact that in thinking about meeting the production and service needs of large numbers of customers, abstractions have replaced actual people? Can these consequences be classified in order of importance?

1 Finding Homo Economicus

*** Can I start with my needs and my own means and find out whether my means can meet my needs? Do needs and means have the same nature? How can one conceive of needs and means so that the one matches the other? Could needs and means have attributes that make them correspond to each other? What are these attributes? What did I do to my awareness of my needs to relate it to my awareness of my means? What terms did I use to consider my means? Money is currently used by almost all the inhabitants of the earth, but can I conceive of means in other than monetary terms? If not, do I also think of needs in terms of money? Or do I reserve money solely for means? How is it that needs have been quantified? Are there needs that we have not yet quantified? Which ones? How do we try to meet them? Am I only a consumer having needs or am I also a producer of goods or services? Can I think of myself as both? *** Do you know what goes into the cost of a product? Make a list.

The Generation of Wealth

How would you know whether there are more components in a cost than those you listed? Look around your kitchen, bathroom, dining room, living room, bedroom. Do you find the same list of products in all of them? Make a list of products in each room and the component parts of each product before you work any further on this enquiry. Have you considered that they all came wrapped? Were they delivered or were they fetched? Did you include such elements when considering costs? Which products do you classify as goods? Which as services? Give your reasons. Make a list of services you do not consider to be goods. Make a list of services that involve goods. Make a third list in which the goods do the services. How could one quantify services? Which services can be quantified using units of energy? Which using units of time? Are there services that simultaneously use energy and time? How does money relate to services? Is there a price for everything? *** I and a supplier pay a price for the same product. Are they the same? Why not?

1 Finding Homo Economicus

Why must there be a difference? In whose favor is this difference settled? Normally a supplier has suppliers himself, but they are not his only cost. Can you think of the costs that must be counted in computing the price of supplying any item? Do you know whether this list is exhaustive? How? If you forgot to include a component in your list, does it tell you something about the way you related to this inquiry? Did you stop because of lack of information on the anatomy of a price or because your thinking is hampered by your interest (or lack of it) for such studies? Can you make yourself work deliberately on the anatomy of one price — say, of an item of footwear or clothing? Looking at your life (and the lives of others around you), do you see that many people have contributed to the making of any item that you wear? Or of the items with which you surround yourself? Or of the items you use constantly or occasionally? Can you let the complexity of what all this represents dwell in your mind? Can you recall it at will? If you can, can you tell yourself: “I am using one of the aspects of myself that is special and deserves a special label, perhaps Homo Economicus?” If you can’t, is this the case all the time and about items you use in your environment? Where do you find exceptions? Can you

The Generation of Wealth

consider the complexity of one of them? Would it help you in doing this to suspect the existence in you of something resembling Homo Economicus? How would this help? Can you deliberately cultivate that presence in yourself? If you do, can you tell yourself: “I am educating the Homo Economicus in me.” *** If you often engage systematically in such searches which lead you to the Homo Economicus in yourself, do you also find that your studies are transforming you into an economist for yourself and maybe even for others? *** In this search for Homo Economicus, we force it to come out and linger by acting on our awareness of some of our involvements in life. If this forcing of awareness initially lets us recognize it in the numerous occasions our commercial society environment offers us, and then lets us entertain it as a state of mind that does not leave us and is part of the fabric of our living, we can say that we have found Homo Economicus in ourselves.

2 Homo Economicus In Modern History

In this chapter, we continue to look for evidence showing the presence of Homo Economicus, directing our attention to modern society. With this focus we shall examine some of the social effects that can be brought about by Homo Economicus. I asserted in the introduction that awareness of Homo Economicus can lead to changes as sweeping as those that followed upon the awareness of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber. In certain contemporary developments, we can see prefigured some of the changes that Homo Economicus can generate.

Funding And Time In Modern Society Any look at Homo Economicus in modern society starts with the pervasiveness of economic considerations. By this I do not simply mean the so-called commercialization of much of modern life â&#x20AC;&#x201D; although this is one expression of Homo

The Generation of Wealth

Economicus. I mean more broadly the fact that almost all contemporary activities in which one engages ultimately involves funding, either through money or time, or both. The realization of any project consumes time, one’s own and the time of others, and few people can afford to give their time away. In most cases, someone has to pay for it. The contribution of time, then, is equivalent to funding. Because the consumption of time is irreversible, we can (and do) use the returns of time — what we receive back in any given situation from the time we invest in it — to measure the worth for us of one activity against another. In this way, we decide to label some activities as essential and others as futile or costly or even too costly. We all do some such “measuring” because it helps us order our activities. To apply awareness to the scrutiny of what our involvements cost us in terms of time and energy, gives our activities a new meaning for us (and possibly for others). When we are able to order our activities carefully and systematically, we run our lives “economically.” At present, however, only a (growing) minority of people can claim to have structured their lives so that reason rather than greed guides the exchange of their time and energy. The cultural values of modern society — the emphasis on money as the most valuable of returns — makes it difficult for us to run our lives “economically,” so that we attain the richest yields for ourselves.

2 Homo Economicus In Modern History

Homo Economicus And Homo Sapiens Today, the public schools offer years of intellectual exercises to develop the Homo Sapiens in people. During those years, everyone slowly and often painfully learns that although the road to becoming a knower is filled with opportunities to make mistakes, it is nonetheless possible to become a knower, a master in the use of the intellect. These educational efforts go on in almost all countries, for mankind as a whole has enthusiastically adopted the task of intellectually educating its young. We shall explore the history of how this happened in the next chapter. Yet, as our brief earlier comments on the presence of Homo Economicus in the development of mathematics might suggest, the outlook of Homo Economicus has also been part of the public school effort. The intellect, when developed, constructs what I earlier termed “virtual actions” — that is, mental operations — and uses them as effectively as physical actions. Virtual actions, however, are more economical. They require less energy, they can be manipulated more swiftly. Mathematics has been the school subject that is the principal (unacknowledged) arena for learning about the dynamics of saving energy and time through the use of virtual actions. In algebra, for example, one thought process is placed upon another precisely for the purpose of performing more for less. Tasks that even a swift and confident intellect might refuse to undertake are contemplated to show that powerful algebraic instruments can reduce such tasks to very manageable undertakings. One instance is the ability to add the 10th powers of the first thousand integers in

The Generation of Wealth

only a few minutes of work. (The answer, with 32 digits, is 91 409 924 241 424 243 424 924 242 500, first ascertained by Jakob Bernouli, before 1715, using the polynominals which bear his name. The invention of algebraic instruments was a fashionable intellectual activity some 300 or so years ago.) The point here is that even in the educational stronghold of Homo Sapiens, the public schools, the presence of Homo Economicus can be seen.

Homo Economicus, The Marketplace, And Social Harmony Over the past two hundred years, it is the not yet fully conscious presence of Homo Economicus that has brought more and more people to the realization that they have a right to their work and time, quite a new perception in the development of Mankind. In the marketplace, the view that an individual owns his or her work and time has been asserted through work stoppages and strikes, devices for withholding one’s labor from one’s employer. For a long time, engaging in stoppages and strikes to seek redresses for newly perceived injustices meant putting one’s life on the line. Such an action, then, required passion, the willingness to risk life itself, and violence often accompanied the claims of workers to the fruits of their labor, as if the claim, now obvious to many, had to be proved again and again. Today, almost everywhere, workers can strike legally in almost all social contexts, including hospitals, prisons, and even cemeteries. The widespread acceptance of the right to refuse one’s labor to one’s

2 Homo Economicus In Modern History

employer represents a growth in awareness in both workers and employers (and managers). Current behavior in the marketplace shows evidence of another growth in awareness, this one almost entirely promoted by the Homo Economicus in the workers and their employers. More and more often these days, workers consider the option of striking or of turning to arbitration. In other words, workers have learned to put aside the urgencies of passion and to calculate the loss or benefit a strike is likely to bring to them. Employers similarly now turn to their workers on the presumption that workers can understand more complex economic situations than the fluctuation of their paychecks. Employers (and city managers) have even asked workers to use their pension funds as the basis for loans to save some failing companies (and cities). A kind of common-sense approach is becoming more and more acceptable to the various constituent elements of any corporation. In thousands of settlements in factories and offices, where until recently only antagonistic groups fought each other for their individual interests, we can see Homo Economicus at work, finding yields appropriate to the complex of elements in any particular situation. This can happen only when passion subsides — that is, only when the participants have grown enough in awareness to see their circumstances as matters of fact and to give the other side a chance to take the whole situation into account. Our world today is full of such shifts in awareness, for many adults recognize the interdependence of people and institutions — they live at the social level of collective awareness — and they take for granted that the intellect as well as action and perception can

The Generation of Wealth

replace passion to settle problems between parties in conflict. In such a context, Homo Economicus is the aspect of Man that integrates the components of a situation according to the principle of social harmony.

Homo Economicus And Social Equality The increasingly prevalent awareness of collective interests now evident in the relations of workers and employers is one example of how the presence of Homo Economicus can lead to new social realities. Homo Economicus, concerned with the yields one receives for one’s time and energy, necessarily must respect the rights of all — most consider yields in a comprehensive framework — or else it does not adequately face the challenge before it. The relation between Homo Economicus and the right that has been labeled “social equality” is especially illuminating. Today, the notion of social equality no longer simply conveys an intellectual concept, an ideal that ignores a multitude of human realities. Nor is “equal opportunities,” an aspect of social equality, any longer seen as a leveling process. It is seen instead as an accepted social goal of providing everyone with his or her chance to get into the race for economic betterment, without determining how far each individual can go. Homo Economicus, the master of yields, has helped create a world in which the “rightness” of individual yields has come more and more to the fore.

2 Homo Economicus In Modern History

To the extent that achieving freedom in oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life can be equated with the removal of obstacles, men become freer whenever they see that a part of their fate or destiny can be controlled. Today, poverty is no longer seen as a virtuous criterion for getting into the kingdom of heaven. Instead, eradicating poverty has become a social problem to resolve - a challenge, I am arguing, identified by Homo Economicus. Charity was considered a virtue when the givers felt that fate (or God) determined their superior place in a structure whose dynamics they were not equipped to perceive. Socialists, who revealed some of the dynamics of the social structure, taught men to replace charity by welfare, a system in which the individual giver was faceless and anonymous and so could no longer be accorded gratitude; giving became a social responsibility, accepted in the name of social equality. Because the majority of the adults in some societies have reached a social level of awareness, the opportunity to live at a level above poverty, which for so long had been a privilege, has now been transformed into a birthright. One consequence of the vastly increased number of economic opportunities has been the development of many new helping and service roles.

Homo Economicus And The Businessperson Today more people are thinking about matters that are the province of Homo Economicus than there are people who think up new knowledge on behalf of mankind (Homo Sapiens) or produce new works of art or generate new technologies (Homo Faber). The representatives of Homo Economicus are the millions and millions of people in business all over the world.

The Generation of Wealth

Because Homo Economicus has not yet come into its own, most of the contributions of those millions of people are simply experiments manifesting one or other aspect of Homo Economicus. Experiments of course do not all lead to lasting results. In fact, most experiments lead to dead ends and to warnings that certain paths should not be followed. But failure deserves no blame, for it helps reveal what had been unknown, and when a great deal is unknown, all new efforts present risks. In such a situation, stories about successes are often collated and studied as models to be emulated. Business schools specialize in such studies. But models of success usually do not serve the purpose of providing guidelines. The truth is, we rarely learn from something that works; if we ever learn, it is usually from something that does not work. In the current situation, of trying to grasp more clearly the dynamics and achievements of Homo Economicus, we should focus on business people themselves, as concrete representatives of men or women who have increased their contact with the Homo Economicus in themselves. To be successful, Homo Economicus must merge both the artist and the scientist. Artists produce what they believe in, and mainly satisfy themselves before they submit their work to the public; scientists work meticulously to uncover what cannot be doubted and must be accepted by all. Business people, in devoting themselves to an uncertain activity that they hope will be successful (acceptable to many), must partake of both the risk taking of the artist and the knowledge-seeking of the scientist. In the marketplace the success of business people is visible to all: they become rich â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that is, they gain the power to do more

2 Homo Economicus In Modern History

for themselves to satisfy their desires. When doing more remains within the field of economics, the rich tend to become richer. There are many ways of becoming rich: inheriting wealth, winning the lottery, betting on a horse, playing roulette, letting a broker select a stock that soars on the Exchange, receiving a large compensation at a jury trial, finding oil under oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s property, and on and on. Wealth in all these ways comes without much participation of oneself, and thus the new wealth generally does not bring out the Homo Economicus in the beneficiary. This happens when the already existing awareness of Homo Economicus is stimulated by the sudden availability of new funds. We must therefore separate the people who deliberately create activities to increase their wealth, those who know the Homo Economicus in themselves, from the people who, although they exchange their time and energy for a salary, may not suspect there is an Homo Economicus in them that could consciously be put to work. Consider bookkeepers, bank tellers, cashiers, Fort Knox guards, even accountants â&#x20AC;&#x201D; all concern themselves with money, in amounts large or small, many hours a day. Yet they perform their functions without feeling the need to reach in themselves any awareness of a Homo Economicus that might occupy their mind and excite their vision of life. They see their functions as activities of Homo Sapiens or Homo Faber. Business managers on the other hand must operate as if the Homo Sapiens in them is subordinated as well. Such managers

The Generation of Wealth

must not only blend the artist and the scientist, they must also add their understanding of people, of trends in life style, and of that vague but critical thing known as the marketplace. They must open their minds to the numerous components handled by lawyers, bankers, insurers, public accountants, tax specialists, investors, planners, and competitors; must consider inventories, cash flow, and credit; and must understand the significance of profits for the survival and possible expansion of their businesses. Further, in larger corporations, business directors and their aides must also be sensitive to the factor of size itself and to the special vulnerabilities that it creates. As corporations increase the scale of their activities, political components become more important, sometimes vital. By political, I mean the involvement not just with the political forces found at various governmental levels but also with large numbers of people, each group of which is eager to protect a turf, their possessions, powers, futures, and the futures of their dependents. For the Homo Economicus in one to acquire the knowledge needed to be comfortable with the many aspects of its work, the scientist in Homo Economicus must learn to use the Homo Sapiens and must sense the value of the human sciences (including psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, and history) for understanding the opportunities and obstacles of the present moment. Such knowledge is not academic or committed to memory and is not tested formally, but it nonetheless is precise enough in its essentials to guide Homo Economicus in the pragmatic decisions that may have life and

2 Homo Economicus In Modern History

death consequences environment.

for

corporation

or,

indeed,

the

The possible scope of Homo Economicus’ activities cannot be overemphasized. Artists and scientists normally involve only themselves and their close relatives in the consequences of their actions and their proposals. Executives in many corporations do far more. Their activities can affect a large number of other people, sometimes the wellbeing of armies of men and women. The effects of their actions can even extend to their entire country, occasionally to other countries as well. Given this scope, Homo Economicus must give itself a preparation that neither Homo Sapiens, with its focus on knowing, nor Homo Faber, with its focus on doing, knows how to offer. Yet each is an element in the education of Homo Economicus. The sensitivity of the artist will allow Homo Economicus to use phrases like, “That was a beautiful strategy,” or “The launching of this product was a masterpiece,” and this perspective in Homo Economicus can help to form human values not yet created by Homo Faber or Homo Sapiens. It seems clear that a new field of artistic expression is to be found in economic transactions of size. Homo Economicus also has the need for studies as rigorous and controlled as those conducted in the sciences. It is no longer an academic or idle curiosity that wants to know how much coal, gold, or uranium can be mined from a particular geological region. Or the depths to which one must dig to strike oil on land or sea. Or what one must do to protect a forest from a certain

The Generation of Wealth

infestation. The information and the studies are the concerns of Homo Sapiens or Homo Faber, but the motivation behind them comes from Homo Economicus.

The Science And Education Of Homo Economicus It is precisely because the domain of Homo Economicus has become a huge field dominating most lives more explicitly than the domains of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber that the workings of Homo Economicus can now become the object of a science which tries to describe its various stages and the dynamics of its evolution. As this is done, it may become possible to use the awarenesses gained from such studies to devise solutions to some of the contemporary worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most pressing human problems. This is the challenge we shall consider in later chapters. Today there is no doubt that adults need an education to bring out the Homo Economicus in them, for in one way or another, all adults are members of commercial societies, whatever the ideological tenor of a given society. Children need such an education too, to reach the insights that will help them find a satisfying place for themselves when they grow up. They need a properly educated Homo Economicus to learn that their environment is a dynamic entity that will simultaneously involve them while allowing them to find the areas for leading their own unique individual lives.

2 Homo Economicus In Modern History

Indeed, the greatest single personal gain any of us can get from becoming more and more aware of the Homo Economicus in ourselves is found in the new opportunities this awareness provides for constructing a life in harmony with the economic strands present in oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thoughts and actions, integrating them consciously for oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own good and the good of others. Instead of counting on the chance contribution of some lucky discoverer who will bring us good news, each of us can make a deliberate contribution to our collective evolution by doing consciously what individually fits our enriched understanding of the dynamics of social progress. These themes may seem abstract now. One of my aims in this book is to help readers invest these with the reality they have.

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

In the first two chapters, we primarily concerned ourselves with revealing the presence of Homo Economicus in a large variety of activities. The aim was to establish the reality of Homo Economicus and to suggest the broad range of circumstances affected by Homo Economicus. In this chapter, we focus on the changing nature of the generation of wealth. As we shall see, the activities of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber — the knowledge gained by Man and the uses to which it has led — led to dramatic changes in the meaning of the generation of wealth. Today, as the attributes of Homo Economicus become clearer and clearer to more and more people, we have reached a pivotal point in both our understanding of ourselves and our uses of energy (a central concern in this chapter), making the generation of wealth accessible to all of us as it never has been before. I shall argue

The Generation of Wealth

here that the environment in which we now live — the environment that Mankind has created through the combined activities of Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus — has opened up the possibility that we can all generate wealth, creating rich yields for ourselves and for human society, just as, earlier in history, certain developments made it possible for all people to develop and expand their knowledge, for both themselves and human society. We need first to consider the role of Homo Economicus in bringing Man to the point of being able to generate wealth. We will briefly review three elements — watchfulness, energy, and the use of symbols.

Watchfulness And Energy Human activity depends on watchfulness. I bypass a full discussion of how watchfulness arises in human beings and why watchfulness distinguishes human life from animal life. I would briefly note, however, that animal life is ruled by instinct while human life is distinguished by the fact that humans act out of watchfulness. Put another way, the essence of human life — the task, the challenge of human life — is to live without instinct. In the place of instinct, we have awareness, and the awareness of awareness, which develops in us watchfulness. I hope that readers, even if they disagree with these statements, will nonetheless entertain them for the discussion to follow, and possibly reconsider them in the light of the discussion.

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

Why do we need to concern ourselves with watchfulness? For the simple reason that from the very beginning of human history, actions that aim at affecting the environment have required the deliberate calibration of the energy necessary to do the job. This calibration first involves measuring the task against the limit of what one can accomplish alone; then, if the assistance of others is necessary, counting the number of additional people who are needed; then, if even more energy is needed, devising and using any of the million artifacts and inventions generated by everyday living in specific environments â&#x20AC;&#x201D; for an early example, digging a trench at the foot of a tree and pulling on the lower branches to topple it. Calibrations occur over many generations, and they ultimately produce a collective solution to recurrent problems associated with such concerns as feeding, shelter, and exploiting a particular environment. Now, when we speak in such short and general phrases as the use of tools of fire, of the wheel, and so forth, we are dismissively telescoping many generations of living and learning, making no effort to assess in precise detail the particular learning that occurred in achieving the use of any of these implements. One can say that it entailed mastering certain unknowns through the process of rectifying mistakes and errors. However, the fact that a project is mastered by a generation of individuals does not mean that it automatically has been mastered permanently by all generations. Humans have no automatic transmission as is the case in animals; instead, they can transmit culture â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that is, information and ways of doing and seeing. As a result each generation of humans must learn

The Generation of Wealth

many things all over again. But they tend to do this in shorter and shorter periods because education (which should be understood in terms of learning not teaching) is at work. By observing people in action and then trying an action oneself, people learn by doing. When a learner is under the vigilant eyes of someone who already has accomplished the task, blunders might be avoided and education may proceed at a faster pace. But the vigilance of another is not necessary. An inner observation also exists, the inner observation of watchfulness, and it is possible for an individual to notice for himself or herself the elements that make some actions successful and that undermine others. In the course of such learning, the proper expenditure of energy becomes a preoccupation even if it does not become an explicit thought. The learning of any activity can be touched by the concern of whether doing this or that leads to greater mastery, and the doing of this or that is nothing other than expending the available energy in the best possible way â&#x20AC;&#x201D; is, in short, Homo Economicus at work. It takes time to become aware of the capacities accessible to oneself, and it has always required study for collectivities to learn how to make use of the accessible capacities. The realization at some point that individuals could join together in activities that then could last longer than the lives of the group must have inspired humans to look for projects that eliminated strife and encouraged cooperation. One such project is the development of symbols, a prime example of which is language. Language was a tremendous step forward in the economical use of energy.

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

The Symbols Of Language - An Example Of Homo Economicus At Work The “fuel” required by symbolic thinking is the energy associated with mental activity. One need only contrast this with the energy needed for physical activities to see at a glance the enormous saving gained by symbolic thinking. The value of symbolic thinking must have slowly imposed itself on humans engaged in collective action. Without the tool of symbols, the time it took to have an intuition, to make sure of it inwardly, to try it out in reality, to draw the proper conclusions, to present it to others, to gain their approval and the cooperation of some — all of this must have taken much longer than the process takes today, and even today it may take years. Thus, generations of our ancestors were needed to integrate progress in one or more of the fields that spontaneously absorbed their interest. It is reasonable to surmise that symbols were adopted because they perceptibly reduced this span of time. Once humans were set on the road of symbolism, it is likely that someone in the community, watchful of this sort of thing, became aware that in certain contexts noises framed in certain ways could act as symbols - in situations of hunting or defense, for an example that now seems to us quite obvious, a sound could serve as a warning (a function of sound, it is useful to note, that already had been the subject of experiments among animals). Probably the first stage in the articulation of language

The Generation of Wealth

was the development of easily produced and repeatable sounds that could be retained for specific purposes. Once such sounds became available, other watchful members of the communities could enlarge the findings — transfer the awareness that sound could be manipulated — to cover new circumstances. Listening to the sounds of animals required no more than watchfulness. But once humans connected certain sounds to specific animals, they could become aware that listening also was a power to make some of the sounds one heard. Even if this happened only rarely, once it did happen to a single individual, the chance that others would attempt it gradually shifted the skill from one to many. Of course, before sounds can be used as signals — which likely occurs first in response to urgent situations and then, as the situations become manageable, expands in more leisurely circumstances — the production of sound must first be mastered. Over the millennia, the activity of producing willed sounds must have affected the structural system in the mouth and throat in the same manner as “functions create organs” during somatic evolution. As the mouth-and-throat structure responded more selectively to commands of the will, it became a more finely tuned instrument of the self. We can surmise these events because of what occurred. In tens of thousands of valleys on earth, tens of thousands of different experiments led to tens of thousands of languages. The enormous variety of languages cannot be explained without the exquisite fine tuning of the mouth-and-throat structure.

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

The development of myriad languages were true experiments in which inventions were tried out independently one from the other. Successive generations refined the results, directed by the awareness that they could label objects which could be individually distinguished and at the same time grouped within a class. Thus, the generations created a collection of commonly agreed upon sounds, later called words. Words in turn were carriers of other awarenesses, and in time most of what could be perceived both inwardly and in the environment was given a label, to permit quick and sure transmission of information from one person to another. Today, this is called communication, and the system of words and all their interrelated alterations is called a language endowed with a grammar. The brief working out of this example illustrates the operation of awareness over a number of generations. That Homo Sapiens is involved in the process is obvious. Homo Faber is also involved because the process generates something that had not existed before and that serves as a tool for communication. But we can now see that Homo Economicus is involved too, because with the development of language, energy can be directed through symbols, thereby saving much of what would otherwise have had to be expended in direct action. Languages are presumed to have appeared long before the economic system of farming became a human institution. But it needs to be recognized that languages are also economic systems, whether or not there is an economy to apply them to. By using languages, humans became much more efficient in their collective undertakings.

The Generation of Wealth

Why has this characteristic of language gone largely unnoticed? We can surmise that the minuteness of the energy used in verbal communication must have made it difficult to perceive language as a creation of Homo Economicus, of humans working in the domain of utilizing energy more efficiently. One further point should be made in this context, concerning the mental powers of those who created languages. Because this went on for some 35,000 to 50,000 years ago (give or take a few thousand years) while our ancestors were also engaged in many other activities (including hunting, building, traveling and warring), we can do no other than endow early humans with such attributes as the following: organizing thoughts, coordinating efforts, forecasting that some existing materials had certain properties and then confirming or disproving the hypotheses in experimental trials. By using themselves in these ways, our ancestors learned to see themselves as makers of cultures or/and civilizations, and this awareness enabled them to replace, for example, the stone age with the iron age. It admittedly takes a leap of the imagination to endow ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago with the use of mental powers we are just beginning to perceive in ourselves. But it is only just that we do not deny them the qualities and attributes necessary to create Cro-Magnon art and the many languages of the world. In recognizing their mental powers, we may gain an insight into the nature and continuity of human life. After humans were sufficiently comfortable with their ability to manipulate their powers, they turned their attention to

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

extending their dominion over the environment. With this development, we can now more directly examine the generation of wealth in history.

Homo Economicus And The Wealth Of Property Animals have a sense of territory and are prepared to risk their lives to hold on to their territory. Humans transformed territory into property, which became one of the first ways that humans amassed wealth. As soon as humans became farmers, they sought to inhabit their property permanently, and they developed relationships to the land that led to conflicts among each other. As long as there existed more land than people who wanted to till it, all was quiet. But once the number of land-desiring humans went beyond the available land, the result was strife. A person could acquire property then only by forcing out the owner. Both the effort to protect property and the effort to acquire it led to wars (at that scale of things). For generations, there were few ways of generating wealth other than by usurping the right of a property owner. And when this happened, the aggressor changed places with the vanquished who could then become the aggressor. In short, the victory of one over the other did not change the basic circumstances. Only when an owner managed to keep property for some time, was there the opportunity for a genuine generation of wealth in the sense that new wealth was created. The same fixed amount

The Generation of Wealth

of wealth was not simply redistributed. This took place when the owner extracted revenues from the property by using the land in a way that went beyond its existence as property alone. Farming was the most common such use of the land, and the sale of farm produce (for barter or cash) generated revenue that left the property intact. This revenue was the yield of the property, revenue that came from something above and beyond the title of ownership and indeed from something that could be done again and again. Once there was a yield, it became possible to think of increasing it on each unit of land, and as this was achieved, there was a clear increase in the generation of wealth. Over the centuries, humans found much to occupy themselves in the task of exploiting the environment to increase its yield. They learned to domesticate animals to do menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, especially the hardest and most monotonous parts of it, and they learned to widen their abilities to do many sorts of activities other than farming. Thus, trading and mining became two additional ways to increase the yield of a land. Slavery, to point to another yield-increasing invention, has been a convenient solution to the problem of insufficient labor, and it is a solution that has been universally adopted. The difference between the work done by slaves, on the one hand, and by animals or through simple machines like levers or pulleys, on the other hand, is found in the fact that slaves, being human, can use their wits (particularly when they see that it is in their own interest to do so).

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

From these few examples, we can generalize the process of generating new wealth. Humans must first take steps in the realm of awareness, then in the realm of action, and then must judge the validity of their thoughts and actions by whether they achieve a better yield or increase human freedom, thereby allowing people to tackle new challenges. This process is empirical, is lived in the here and now, and the lessons drawn from it are learned the hard way. Once they are learned, they are integrated into the collective knowledge, and the new understandings open up the future for additional adventures, experiments, and new gains. As we shall see more fully in later chapters, the greatest repercussion comes from gains in awareness because they can be transferred from one area of being to another.

Homo Economicus And The Emergence Of Money As developments reached a certain level, the usual forms of trading and barter seemed increasingly cumbersome, and became the subject of innovation and experimentation. History tells us that several different solutions were applied to the task of simplifying trading and that money was discovered several times. Finally, money became the clear winner as the best vehicle for trading. Its success is due to such properties as ease of handling and instant transferability from one transaction to another. Further, coins made of gold or silver, metals valued by traders from different regions, could be used again and again in all sorts of exchanges.

The Generation of Wealth

With money came many changes in the minds and habits of men. Money made it possible to quantify wealth, and wealth could now be expressed in numbers that were easily compared, and being wealthy could be defined as having a certain amount of money. Generating wealth took place when one’s activities led to the acquisition of more money than one had before. Today, though acreage, heads of cattle, and volume of products still represent measures of an individual’s wealth, the assessment of wealth is more immediately accessible when it is expressed in (the local) currency. Money made accounting possible, and governments of ancient civilizations used accounting to gather economic facts that they considered useful to ruling their countries. We should note, though, that the motive behind these operations came from Homo Sapiens, the knower, rather than Homo Economicus, the pursuer of greater yields. The issue was one of forecasting natural conditions and preparing for the worst. Joseph’s interpretation of the Pharaoh’s dream of fat and lean cows illustrates the situation. Responsible ministries collected economic data so that, by planning, they could offset the impact of lean years.

The Few Rich And The Many Poor We can surmise that it took some time for Mankind to realize that having enough wealth meant more than simply preparing for and off-setting the years to come. It meant as well, and more significantly, the ability to keep increasing one’s wealth. Wealth in the proper amounts, properly handled by Homo Sapiens and

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

Homo Faber, led to more wealth. When it became clear that wealth could be accumulated and increased, Man no longer used his time and efforts to renew just his store of energy; he also put his mind to generating wealth in limitless amounts. In the early stages of human history, wealth meant the ability to command energy. With the coming of money, it came to mean the accumulation of (some form of) currency. Croesus is the legendary example. As open-ended accumulation became possible for a small number of people, the notion of being rich came into existence. The non-rich by contrast became the poor, a concept covering a spectrum ranging from the totally destitute to those able only to do enough to renew their energies. The fact that few were rich and many were poor had important consequences for understanding the individual traits that led to wealth. As long as the rich remained few in numbers, observers in such domains as history, philosophy, and ethics found no need to conceive of a universal attribute that could enable all humans to create wealth. Instead, they looked for attributes that were present in the rich and absent from the non-rich. The rich were characterized at the expense, so to speak, of the non-rich. This juxtaposition led to the view, for example, that one characteristic of the rich was cunning, a trait illustrated in the Biblical story of Laban who squeezed fourteen years of labor from his nephew Jacob in exchange for Laban’s two daughters (who became Jacob’s wives) but none of Laban’s wealth.

The Generation of Wealth

New Sources Of Wealth And The Expanding Marketplace As the marketplace became the vehicle for the trading and selling of farm goods, some men took on the task of learning how to extend the life and tradability of their produce. They invented such things as storage and developed the techniques that led to cheese, dry fruit, and the preservation of vegetables and fruits. Such knowledge and skills, the achievement of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber, were then passed on to the following generations, who took it all for granted. Men without farms sought other kinds of goods to sell. One of the first non-farm goods found to be profitable was salt, which was needed by people who ate cooked meals and which was not always locally available. Thus, salt mines, which were scattered underground, thereby giving a special value to the land above them, offered wealth outside of farming, and landowners exploited the opportunity they presented. As the world population increased, there were additional opportunities for generating wealth. Some knowledgeable salt merchants added spices to the goods they purchased from abroad and then transported, stored, and sold in the markets. But the merchants needed new facilities to guarantee the safe transportation of the goods over sometimes great distances. Ships, harbors, and roads were all needed, providing new opportunities for men willing to take risks and new ways of getting rich without owning land. The common denominator of money integrated property and goods. The old rich and the new

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

rich, the landowner (the aristocrats of their societies) and the merchants (without pretense or tradition), found ways to cooperate, although not to live together. Commerce itself became a source of wealth, and, indeed, a new kind of wealth. People who served as intermediaries in the delivery of goods received a percentage of their value, and as transactions grew in value and numbers, larger absolute sums of money went to the middlemen. This process generated a new kind of wealth: people were getting rich without making anyone else poorer. Everyone involved in the expansion of trade was getting something from it. Wealth itself was expanding — a new phenomenon. Landowners, merchants, and trades-people saw that they had common economic interests, and they helped each other to become richer. Meanwhile, the poor, the laborers, and the peasants continued to be treated as before. Their work contributed to making some people rich, but in return they received essentially only the food they needed to recreate the energy they spent in their tasks. They received food directly (if they were serfs or slaves) or in the form of a “salary” sufficient to buy enough food to maintain their family at a subsistence level.

Homo Sapiens, The Renaissance, And Colonization Now came a momentous change generated by a new awareness. The change is the extraordinary development in the West called the Renaissance, which in turn led to the remarkable economic

The Generation of Wealth

adventure called colonization. Adventurous mariners found ways of grabbing lands far from their countries, and exploiting the resources and populations of these far-off places. None of this would have happened had there not been a widespread new awareness of the powers of the human intellect. For centuries prior to the Renaissance, the mental energies of Mankind in Europe were focused in the theological arena, in an attempt to learn exactly what the Creator wanted of the creature called Man. These efforts proved fruitless, and there arose the simple recommendation that the fallen creature known as Man direct his attention to other creatures instead of relating to an unfathomable God. With this suggestion, the leaders of the European peoples started a revolution that is still with us, and the mental energies that had proved powerless to understand God proved fully able to study nature. In less than a century, the overall European situation had totally changed: colonization of the American continents had begun (that is, exploited to the benefit of Europe); circumnavigation had taken Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch adventurers to Africa, Asia, and the Western Pacific; soon after the British and the French followed suit. History books on the period stress the struggles of countries, their wars, alliances, and politics. But this does little to illumine the radical transformation of the planet from a large collection of valley-cultures into an interrelated organic unit beginning to find its forms. The real meaning of the Renaissance is that Homo Sapiens became the center of attention. Man the knower

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

became king, and when this happened whole new areas of wealth became possible. The Renaissance created one science after another to cope with the attributes of nature. Less than 150 years after Columbus’ journeys to the Americas, scientists had invented both the microscope, which opened the micro world to scrutiny, and the telescope, which opened the galactic universes. Botany threw its nets on the realm of plants, zoology on the realm of animals. Mathematics stretched its net beyond arithmetic and geometry to create models of the earth, leading to maps that facilitated travel and the search for riches. Physics, by specializing in the mechanical attributes of reality, tackled problems that permitted the construction of larger and safer ships to face the open oceans. By the end of the 17th century, with Newton’s contributions in a number of fields and both his and Leibniz’ creation of the calculus, the intellect was made sovereign. The inventors of practical ideas formed a new class of the wealthy, joining the landowners, the merchants, and the tradespeople, and some of them began the process, whose dynamics still propel us today, of superimposing on the natural world a man-made world in which human laws prevailed. The awareness of Homo Sapiens revealed the presence in all humans of Homo Faber. One consequence is that ideas, intellectual property, gained reality. Engineers proved to be essential in speeding up the generation of wealth. They were invited to create a new kind of property, the factory, which produced goods to be sold both locally and in the colonies. In the process, moneylenders became bankers, who were more essential for the

The Generation of Wealth

new adventures than moneylenders had been in their role of supplying rulers with funds for wars or conquest. In spite of the class distinctions still prevailing, in which hereditary owners formed the so-called aristocracy and the other groups the “nouveaux riches,” it was in the new expanding world of industry, rather than in the expansion of the more traditional domains of trade and commerce, that the majority of the rich invested their energies, time, and money. Industry filled new needs created by trade and commerce, expanding more and more, reaching more and more people. In many countries, businesses proliferated to cope with increasing inventories and the attendant problems of manufacturing, packaging, storing, transporting, and selling outlets. In every one of these fields, there were opportunities for Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber, and the opportunities were seized by many who managed to survive the mistakes associated with learning new operations. Some of these people managed to make new fortunes, often creating colonial commercial units as large as the units owned by the old rich back home, and fostering new empires supported by military forces. The occupational boundaries of the wealthy had expanded — engineers and bankers as groups could now join the wealthy because both were able to generate wealth — but many others were still excluded. Scientists and researchers could become wealthy only on an individual basis, by marriage or by identifying a patentable product in one of their theoretical discoveries. The creation of patent offices in many countries served to control the entry of inventors into the wealthy class — inventors could become wealthy only if they were permitted to

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

exploit their inventions — and to channel inventions towards those who could make the most of them. In a few instances individual inventors did find a way, through commanding some rights over their “intellectual property,” to generate wealth for themselves and for those who were ready to invest in commercializing the inventions. Some inventors, like Edison, created their own businesses to exploit their work. It took the insight of Marx and Engels in the mid-eighteen hundreds to begin the process that led the mass of workers to realize that they too were an essential element in the fabric of production and therefore in the generation of wealth, and that they had the right to demand a greater portion of the wealth they helped to produce. The workers had to learn to see themselves as a necessary fraction of every product on the market and that they thus were entitled to have more than their physical energy renewed. It took many decades, struggles, and revolutions to convince workers that they were an indispensable component of the processes generating wealth. It took this expenditure of time and effort to develop the techniques to force upon the rich the awareness that they could not have generated and maintained their wealth by themselves. This realization was encouraged by the crystallization in Europe of what we know today as social awareness. The working out of the intellectual absolute and its significance for generating wealth brought Mankind to a new absolute, the

The Generation of Wealth

social absolute, and with it, a whole new range of options for generating wealth.

From Man As An Intellect To Man As A Social Being During the 19th century, Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber were busy changing the face of the earth, creating industry upon industry, building canals, railways, harbors, shipyards, and ships. But not everyone was doing this. Intellectuals who had idolized Reason, the source of the Renaissance, began to find it wanting when the excesses of Robespierre tarnished the French Revolution. Robespierre then instituted places to worship the deity of Reason, thus making reason totally irrational. The decades of Napoleonic wars and their trail of misery added to the disenchantment with Reason produced a turn to the inner sources of inspiration, leading to the discovery of a tender center in every human. The official label for this experiment with emotions rather than thoughts is Romanticism. Industrialization and Romanticism were two aspects of the vast changes transforming European awareness, changes symbolized by the year 1832, the date of both the English legislation that represents the official starting point of the first Industrial Revolution and the opening night in Paris of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, a milestone of French Romanticism which scandalized the French public. These events did not of course start the movements they celebrate. Rather they confirmed the widespread phenomenon that the inner world of people was changing. Goethe’s Werther had already swept Europe and to

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

the astonishment of many thoughtful people had generated an epidemic of suicides among young men. Even in the absence of the communication media, which obviously can spread news faster than coaches used for travel, there was no doubt that the world was changing. The awareness behind the Renaissance had brought human beings out of the divine absolutes that had defined their lives in terms of a supernatural or eternal authority, such as divine monarchies, hereditary aristocracies, or all-powerful spiritual churches. These absolutes could no longer be imposed on people who were active in their worlds, either politically or through intellectual prestige or wealth. By the 19th century it had become additionally clear that individuals had a place in society. The question was: What place? The intellectual explorations of the Renaissance were not adequate to supply an answer. The mid-century revolutions of 1848 in Europe were a signal that something new was emerging everywhere. Napoleon had sowed the seeds that in France and North America gave common men some hope that they could be free and could count on the support of others, their brothers, their equals. The ideas of Marx and Engels gave this hope an intellectual basis, and the consequences of their thought are likely to remain with us as long as Marxist socialism is seen as an ideal reflecting the real aspirations of men. But Marx and Engelsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; proposals were politically explosive and had to be supported by street struggles and revolutions. A science expressing the new social absolute demanded a politically neutral formulation. Such a formulation appeared almost simultaneously with the Communist Manifesto, when Auguste Comte, a professor at the

The Generation of Wealth

College de France in Paris (dedicated to research since 1515, in the Renaissance), founded the science of sociology. Comte proposed the study of a new kind of fact — the behavior of people in collectivities. At the end of the century, the sociologist Emile Durkheim would dub these facts “social facts.” Comte futher proposed that the new fact be captured by a new kind of objectivity utilizing statistical methods, which identified the surface appearance of activities. Now, it is important to see that the science Comte proposed focused on an area outside of the State. In Europe, ever since the appearance in 1761 of Rousseau’s influential paper on the origins of inequality, the State had come to be viewed as an expression of the will of the citizens who elected their representatives. At the same time, citizens were also people with inalienable rights that the State had been created to protect. The distinction between the citizen and the person is evident in the United States Constitution (1776), but the Preamble to the first French Constitution (1791) states the point more categorically. It declared that there are two parts to each individual, the occasional citizen and the permanent man. This distinction parallels the distinction between the State and Society. The regular life of men occurs in Society, in that set of private lives each of which is preoccupied with its own interest rather than the common interest. Thus, Society and State form two layers that meet only when Man becomes a citizen and either votes for a politician who is likely to look after his interests, or far less frequently, is himself elected to office.

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

Sociology is the objective study of what Man does in Society. Lives in Society are “private” in the sense that the laws of the State do not govern them. They are thus “deprived” (privée, in French) of the dominance of these laws. But there are other laws operating in Society itself (such as the laws producing suicides) which it is the task of sociologists to recognize and articulate.

Living The New Social Awareness It should be clear that a science can exist only when there is a widespread awareness that the reality it intends to study exists. Sociology could be proposed and be accepted only when the new awareness of Man’s reality became perceptible first to some, then to many, finally to all. It happens that the human relations cultivated within Christianity — the religion of love — had prepared a certain number of people to see that a dynamic exists linking the individual to the group. But living through this awareness required widespread passion, and with it came the creation of the “social absolute” that in the past 150 years has literally conquered the world. Over this period Homo Sapiens examined its social characteristics through a vast number of studies, including sociology, anthropology, paleontology, and many other branches of the human sciences. At the same time, a vast number of experiments in living were instigated under many forms to uncover the actual content of the new absolute. These experiments include trade unions, modern bureaucracies, modern corporations, moderns universities, numerous professional associations, and international organizations.

The Generation of Wealth

These experiments, which evolved over time (leading to social functions other than those they were created to fulfill), all came to recognize the importance of budgets â&#x20AC;&#x201D; for anyone attempting to do anything in society. Thus, because all social activities need funding, more and more attention was devoted to economic considerations. First thousands, then hundreds of thousands of people became sensitive to the economic aspect of their activities and their intentions. Inside a social climate, collective life could continue only if the actions of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber were integrated by the actions of Homo Economicus.

Homo Economicus, The Human Sciences, And The New Man-Made Environment We have so far identified two of the three central influences that led to the recognition of Homo Economicus among us. The three influences were all occurring simultaneously. One derives from the activities of European sociologists who were gathering social facts concerning all of Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s worldly involvements. A second derives from Karl Marx, who, in turning his searchlight on das Kapital, revealed a monstrously large entity with its own developing story. The third influence derives from Darwin who was converting biologists and many others to the reality of evolution, which in philosophical terms means that life can only be understood if it is seen as changing in time. Each of these influences was a component in the collective movements of awareness that helped uncover Homo Economicus. From the sociologists, it was possible to perceive

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

the existence of social forces; from Marx, to perceive that by understanding the realm of economics, men could gain a greater control of their environment; from Darwin, to perceive that by understanding the inheritance of billions of years of change on earth, men could integrate all the good of that past and put it at the service of their well-being as the dominant biological group. One result of these awarenesses were Homo Sapiensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; new fields of study that essentially centered on Man (even though some fields looked at many other things â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the science of the earth, for example). Through the human sciences Man discovered that he was a tremendous force shaping the environment and that the environment could be man-made rather than natural or supernatural. In his actions on the environment, to make it more efficient and to make it yield more, more quickly, Man was objectifying Homo Economicus. And nowhere as much as within the Western Civilization. For the human sciences put Man in charge of human evolution, and it has been in Western Civilization that Man has begun to realize this newly perceived authority. In the field of chemistry, Homo Sapiens discovered that he could use the methods of nature to produce new molecules not found in nature, and produce them so that they had predetermined properties to achieve selected tasks. Homo Faber then generated the factories that gave objective form to what Homo Sapiens had conceived, and with more and more man-made objects, the environment was submerged. In the last 50 years, for example, the plastics industry invaded homes and stores, finding a place alongside stone, wood, or metal, and sometimes supplanting these natural materials. Further, when men used natural

The Generation of Wealth

materials, their properties constrained Man’s intentions; the natural forced the mind to bend to it. With a creation like plastics, men could force it to comply with their desires, intentions, and aims. In physics, which was invented to identify the laws of force as a source of movement, Man created the laboratory science of electricity, which had been so hidden in nature that it was even not visible as a force. Homo Sapiens blended with Homo Faber to create everything in the universe of usable electricity, deriving the material from nature (copper wires, for example, and supporting frames of insulators) but shaping it so that technology could do what it wished. In this way, the groundwork was set for the electrical industries of the 20th century, including the industries of energy transmission, lighting, electrical appliances, elevators, and escalators. In biology, which aimed to tell us about the mechanisms of life, Homo Sapiens went deep into the molecular level and found that catalytic molecules can be microfactories for producing substances that are in short supply in nature but are needed to shape life to Man’s prescriptions. Homo Faber created the biological industries which integrated the chemicopharmaceutical industries born last century when chemistry rather than biology lined the walls of the mind. As these and other fields of study progressed, a development of singular importance occurred in many of them. The focus of attention became minute amounts of energy — catalysts, hormones, enzymes, vitamins, electrons, photons — each of

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

which had enormous repercussions in the various systems of which they were a part. I like to call these bits of energy that, correctly manipulated, have such powerful effects, “nothings.” I shall return to this stunning development, for it is “nothings,” both material and human, that give us the opportunity to command our history. While “nothings” were emerging in so many sciences, Homo Sapiens also found offshoots of radioactivity containing huge forces of nature. By mastering these forces, he could find the energy for his wildest projects, like leaving earth and conquering what was conquerable in the solar system or even the cosmos. Homo Faber complied, as we now see in the space programs of the Soviets and the United States, but did so with the important proviso that Homo Economicus allowed Homo Faber to proceed on the projects of Homo Sapiens. It was only Homo Economicus that found the funds for this work, through a careful analysis of income and outlays, costs and benefits, and the demands of other projects. It has become clear that the dreams of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber can be realized only with the complicity of Homo Economicus. This new triad needs an integrating solution, which this book argues can be found in a new generation of wealth.

Energy And Work, Time And Work For most of human history, expenditures of energy, first human, then mechanical, have been the measure of economic activity. Even a hundred years ago, the aim of the socialist and communist revolutions could be adequately summed up by

The Generation of Wealth

calling for worker, ownership of the means of production, which essentially depended on energy. But slowly over time, new components began appearing in the economic arena. Cohorts of workers were needed in thousands of capacities to make commerce move smoothly, and were no longer engaged in production work at farms, factories, or mines. Further, and most critically for our current study, while-collar workers in such jobs as bookkeepers, typists, inventory watchers, and office aides were expending little energy in contrast to the activities of bluecollar workers. The pay of blue-collar workers tended to be linked to the energy they expended. Clearly the same formula could not be used for while-collar workers. Gradually, the measure for their compensation became the time they spent at their tasks. As time replaced energy as a measure of a worker’s contribution to the economy, a profound change occurred in the value accorded different components of the workplace. Production still remained essential — it was still just as necessary to make the goods that individuals and industry wanted — but the operations that brought the goods to their users, involving whole new chains of people, soon became essential as well. The importance of services became painfully clear when strikes by a small number of people paralyzed a country as easily as did general strikes of blue-collar workers 50 or so years earlier. Postal workers are an example. Although each postal worker performed an almost menial job, postal workers as a group successfully controlled the economy because they brought orders to businesses and checks to keep the flow of cash moving. Truck drivers, airport controllers, locomotive engineers, who did all their work either sitting or expending little physical energy,

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

had far more power in the economy than conveyed by their individual jobs. Individual insignificance could be translated into enormous group significance if the individuals organized and simply refused to do their share of (relatively) minor work within the organism of the economy. Their place in the economic system was much like that of small organs in a living body which effect the whole system, sometimes leading to its death, when they cannot do their usual lubricating work or come to a standstill. Now, the economy is not yet quite like the body, at least yet. The “organisms” we are considering here are not at a stage of perfect coordination, and many jobs do not require the expertise manifested by the cells, tissues, and organs of a living organism and can instead be performed by equivalently endowed people, many of whom can be found in the ranks of the unemployed. Still, if time is the essential measure of one’s contribution to the economy, then, logically speaking, one needs to conceive of this measure in terms of more than a single facilitating role performed alike by everyone in an economic organism. An additional aspect of time — a function, in mathematical terms — depends on the number of neighboring “cells” that a particular job affects. A job can be one of leadership or of coordination or of maintaining the dynamics in a system. The value of one’s time on different jobs thus varies, and can be differentiated by attaching appropriate value coefficients to the giving of one’s time. Otherwise, in terms of clock time, which is neutral and flows by itself, steadily and irretrievably, the different ways we spend time would all be equal. But this is not so. Not everyone is equally able to change time into something tangible and

The Generation of Wealth

valuable for oneself, for oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s employer, or for a larger entity like society.

Time And The Generation Of Wealth By making time as important as energy, and indeed even more important, our modern world has altogether transformed Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s grasp of the social environment and the nature of generating wealth. For the fact is that everyone has time in a way that everyone does not have energy. And because everyone has time, everyone has the stuff with which to generate wealth. The proposition that the emergence of time in economic activity can lead to a universal generation of wealth may seem like so much rhetoric. But it is a statement that describes the reality of our world. Everybody has time, it is given to us, it is the stuff of life, and it must be spent. We all have energy as well, but we feel that energy depends on our will, inclinations, and tastes; we feel that it can be directed towards ends we may give ourselves or accept from others. Time in contrast seems to run away uniformly, anonymously, irreversibly, for all of us, as if the rotation of the earth grinds it out of our individual allotments. Time, though elusive, is a tyrant that we can feel pressing us. If we do not learn to use it properly, it is wasted irretrievably, and we can find ourselves old, lonely, and empty handed, facing death as a final resolution that actually resolves nothing. How to exchange time for something one values may well be the central problem to solve in understanding the modern meaning

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

of generating wealth. For today everyone who comes with the capital of time to contribute to the overall development called the world economy can generate wealth. The question we face is how to make this exchange genuinely valuable for the individual. We shall return to this problem in the later chapters.

“Nothings” And The Generation Of Wealth We now need to return to that most critical element of our story, the emergence of what I have called “nothings,” those small bits of energy that can have such powerful effects and that are changing our everyday life. Physics tells us that we cannot get more energy out of something than the amount we put in. But the identification of “nothings” — including hormones, vitamins, photons, and ideas — proves that there are conditions when an extremely small outlay of energy produces a remarkably large return. “Nothings” show us that we can get a great deal for very little, a true and extraordinary generation of wealth. We have possibilities before us today that are much greater, much more revolutionary than the changes that permitted women to enter the workplace. That development became possible when machines removed many of the physical obstacles blocking the contribution of women and the growth of services absorbed more and more women while men remained dedicated to production and flocked to factories, mines and the military at war. Today the cry “equal pay for equal work” exists only because of the lingering notion that the economy depends on physical work

The Generation of Wealth

and that work is for males while females attend to the house and homemaking duties. Reality no longer supports these notions, for both obvious and perhaps not-so-obvious reasons. The mental revolution required to cope with the essential problems of tomorrow depends on a proper understanding of the trends of today, which depends in turn on a better understanding of the evolution of Man and his environment, several elements of which we have described in this chapter. Such an understanding includes knowledge of time, energy, and “nothings,” and also of the tremendous gifts that contemporary humans have become aware of possessing as a matter of course: the gifts we label intelligence, resourcefulness, sensibility, imagination, steadfastness, etc. At prior moments in history, we could not say — we did not know — that everyone had these powers. At this moment we can. For centuries adult males monopolized the universe of productive work, adhering to their beliefs that they alone were capable of it. Now they know better, and adult females have joined them — and both together say that the universe of work is only for adults. But perhaps this too, like the attitude of men toward women, is a prejudice worth exposing. Is it not clear that children can become expert in the handling of computers and robots, the technology of today, even more so than the masses of adults? It is inevitable that children will eventually join the workforce, for gradually we will understand that their living too is also the exchange of time into experience — in this instance, of experience both with “nothings” that do not tax their physical strength and with subtle material (but no more subtle than the words they master before they are four) that can show them

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

their place in the whole fabric of human endeavors and allows them to make their social contribution to it. This contribution can be as original, functional, and useful as the recent contribution of women entering the workforce and the contribution over centuries of men. The conjunction of the fleetness of time and the “nothings” of energy forms the basis for the hope that we can now undertake (probably with much more ease than preconceptions would allow) the global economic revolution that will stop the visible and painful dysfunctions in society and will open the future to everyone. To anticipate our later discussion, we are all good workers on the somatic and linguistic levels from the beginning of our lives, and we need to place the problems of future economic growth on such levels. Once we do this, we can see that a vastly different world is in the making, one in which all humans are invited to contribute as well as benefit. This includes, in particular, the people seen today as weak and poor — but only because of the way they are looked at today, a perspective the future can change.

The Strands Of Our Story Let us attempt to articulate the several strands that emerge from this historical overview of the generation of wealth. We have seen first that in order to understand human history we must begin with the light of awareness. This light is needed to see beyond the visible contents of the lives of those who produced historical changes and to consider the reflective work

The Generation of Wealth

of examining how to do some things differently so as to do them better. Without the inheritance of experience, a component reached by awareness, no one can understand progress in human affairs. One generation of pioneers breaks ground, makes a number of mistakes, and learns from them, thereby saving the next generation the trouble of making the same mistakes and providing it with the opportunity of breaking new ground, making its own mistakes, and learning from them, so that the next generation can go another step forward, and on and on. The present arises from the past and also remakes it. Thus, economics, seen properly, covers more than the goods and services that are the items of exchange. Economics is the component of living that from the start of life is involved with getting a better yield for every investment. Economics is the objectification of the awareness that pays attention to the return for whatever one expends and is analytical enough of the return to assess objectively the possibilities of doing better and of implementing the effort. Economics, the study of yields, is nothing more nor less than an essential part of the fabric of human living. We next saw that Homo Economicus is as much a characteristic of Man as Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber. Because awareness works at various levels, it is sometimes chance, sometimes circumstances, sometimes the opportunity of centering on one or other functioning that leads an individual to stop focusing on what he or she is doing and thinking and move to a higher level of awareness. We can do things without being aware of our

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

ability to do them. This unrecognized ability is the first level of awareness. When we become aware of our ability, we move to the second level of awareness — the awareness of awareness. When we become aware that we know that we know, we move to the third level of awareness — the awareness of awareness of awareness. It is at this level that we perceive the attributes of Man which we have labeled Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and now Homo Economicus. Today we are entering a layer of awareness in which we will find it difficult to believe that no prior generation saw the obvious: that Man is constantly engaged in economic transactions covering all his activities in one life and in successive generations. A third strand in our discussion has been to illuminate the activities leading to the enlightenment of men’s awareness. This has occurred when men see (sometimes without an awareness of their insight) that they can increase their mastery of the environment by finding something in themselves that can be objectified in the world and function as an “assistant.” Thus, the history of Man on our planet includes the development of an array of tools and instruments, which slowly changed the tasks of survival into a way of living that could safely ignore survival as a motive for one’s actions and replace it with a concern for being and becoming, for enjoying one’s life, and for always doing more, first for oneself and then for others or even for everyone. These tools and instruments, Man’s assistants, range from domesticating animals so as to relieve oneself of muscular work, to the harnessing of the atom and the electron so as to create an inexhaustible source of energy, which has been used to create new items incessantly for a life of freedom in all activities.

The Generation of Wealth

The fourth strand has been the recognition that the natural habitat of Man is the undivided earth. Man is an earthian phenomenon. Civilization and cultures are products of time, they each appear and proceed to objectify some experiment across the span of successive generations until the experiment has taught all it is capable of teaching, opening the future for a new experiment. Today, the next experiment is that “earthians” — humans who recognize their global home — take charge of the earth in the light of what is now in their power to accomplish beyond the accomplishments of all other previous experiments, which together can teach us what to avoid if we want to remain on earth as people with a future. The fifth strand has been the recognition that although history so far has been the expression of adventurers opening new paths for themselves and for others, the history of increasing yields for each action shows us that yield matters. Today, with the new “nothings” of energy, we can see that there is room for everyone to take part in the generation of wealth men as they have done since the past, women who have begun to do so in recent times, and now the young, because of the electronic gadgets that they understand better than adults. This fifth strand serves as a bridge between the history of the past and the history of the future. The history of the past can be seen in terms of awareness and therefore as part of Man’s evolution as he continues to realize his potential by trying to understand what can be learned from living with passion within certain unquestioned, guiding absolutes. Thus, we use the past to bring the future into the present, as we continue or complete the experiments of an earlier absolute.

3 Homo Economicus: The Generation Of Wealth In History

*** When the awareness that economics is essentially the exchange of time for something else becomes part of our collective awareness, then Homo Economicus will emerge fully grown with a past going back to the first specific human awareness that the destiny of Man was to live awareness to the full rather than to live an instinct, as do animals. With the understanding of time and the growing visibility of Homo Economicus, Man has taken charge of his evolution and continues on his path to realize the destiny of living awareness. The task that faces us, then, is to educate awareness properly.

4 The Task Of Today

In the last chapter, we traced some of the changing expressions of Homo Economicus and the generation of wealth in history. We saw how Homo Economicus — the concern with yields — manifested itself more clearly and more prominently over time, and how changing conditions changed the dynamics and materials by which wealth was generated. Here we focus on the present situation and try to identify the special elements that affect the generation of wealth today.

Funding And Today’s Demands We have to keep in mind, as we have noted before, that all social actions need to be funded. All activities in societies have this economic component. Thus, when we look at the urgent tasks at hand, we must remember their solutions all involve economics. In a sense, this is an obvious point. What else does all the heated political discussion about budgets mean other than that everything in society has a cost? What is not so obvious is its implication, that economics is an integral part of living in the world — and that this is so, as the earlier discussion has shown,

The Generation of Wealth

because, like thinking and doing, the concern with yields is an essential human attribute. We cannot properly consider the tasks that beset human society today without considering issues of funding. What are these tasks? It is Homo Sapiens, the student of reality, who has grasped the many challenges facing us at the end of the 20th century. It is Homo Sapiens who recognizes that we must work simultaneously on the loss of fertile soil being carried away to the oceans by the rain-swollen rivers overflowing their banks; on the growth of the world population, which is lowering the standards of living; on the pollution of our air and waters, which will produce social decline, everywhere and for everyone. It is Homo Sapiens who understands that only its work can find new sources of clean energy. It is Homo Sapiens, inspiring Homo Faber, who will coordinate the transformations of the technologies that currently provide the means to live on our present wealth, generating new means that are more efficient and less costly. The existing blend of Homo Sapiens and Homo Economicus already is sufficient to maintain our hope that practical solutions exist for the problems looming so large today, and that hope is permissible, even in the midst of acid-rain pollution, of starvation in Africa, of an enormous increase in Asiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population, of the depletion in the sources of fuel energy.

4 The Task Of Today

The Earth One factor affecting our work in the world today is the reality that the earth as a whole has become the habitat of Man. Today, whoever invents a way of doing something at a lower cost does so on behalf of everybody, even if the invention belongs to a profit-making company. For example, all the inhabitants of the earth can have access to a worldwide communication system without paying for the cost of that system; most people need only pay for a unit capable of linking up with it. The large cost of building and launching a satellite, which serves as a kind of continent in space, enables every household, at a small cost, to become part of much larger units in its own country and even in larger segments of the earth, almost instantaneously. The large research cost of solving the problems of fusion of nuclei in the laboratory is likely to achieve in the not-too-distant future an infinitely larger access to the energy in matter, to the benefit of everyone. For that kind of energy will then be as available as the â&#x20AC;&#x153;nothingsâ&#x20AC;? we already use with so little attention. Of course, we are not yet a socially unified planet, and it will take some time to reach that point. But the obstacles now are no longer the technological problems of running our world as one unit. We can see that a world society is in the making. The inner movements of a certain number of people (whose numbers, it is safe to say, are increasing) have transformed them into inhabitants of the earth. They now think and act as if the earth, and not this or that country or region, is the true human habitat.

The Generation of Wealth

As world society becomes a functioning organism, it will increasingly be able to respond quickly to any diseased part in it. For now our dual tasks are to direct our mental energies to the immediate problems of the earth and to secure enough funding to take care of the problems as best we can at this juncture.

The Changing Character Of Employment And Wealth But our problems need to be understood in the context of the approaching future rather than the departing past. Consider the idea of full employment. As we recognize the consequences and properties of our technologies, Homo Sapiens blended with Homo Economicus will recognize that full employment no longer means governments should procure a job for everyone in accord with the old-fashioned view that every able person who wants a job should have one. Today, automation and robots are filling the jobs that once provided employment in manufacturing plants. The technologies of â&#x20AC;&#x153;nothings,â&#x20AC;? which brings us so much for so little, are doing away with so many jobs that demand routine expenditures of time and energy, and at the same time are providing new and different kinds of opportunities. Full employment will soon need to be defined as the process by which every individual will find a number of occupations to fulfill his or her life, devoting a substantial portion of it to creating a human planet respectful of all creatures on earth. The nature of wealth will also change, and become a social rather than an individual concern. The situation of fuel sources

4 The Task Of Today

is a good illustration. Until we reach the endless sources of energy that will enable us to spend energy without constraint, there will continue to be a dependence on those who control fuel sources (in essence, a gift of nature to them). These people are not likely to allow such sources to be depleted before they themselves have ensured their future by exchanging “their” fuels for large sums of money. Hence, they will ask for as much as they can get to supply what others need now. However, the use of fuels as wealth was not possible until Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber found how to get at the fuel and give it value. Homo Sapiens conceived of using firewood as energy. Homo Faber then learned how to use what Homo Sapiens had discovered. Such blendings increase human control over the environment, easing or improving human lives. When this happens, Homo Sapiens can join with Homo Economicus to produce even better yields — which is to say, even greater improvements. And all this flows from wealth that was just there and that Man learned to use. As Homo Economicus completes the triad of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber, the dynamics among them will lead to the recognition that wealth is truly wealth when it favors humans — that is, gives them time to do what they wish, freedoms they did not have before.

“Nothings” And The Future A key to generating wealth today is the powerful, minute type of energy I call a “nothing.”

The Generation of Wealth

In advanced societies, we all take for granted the presence of instruments like the telephone and television which put so much of the world at our reach and enable us to contact people half across the earth simply by pushing a few buttons. This could not ever have happened if we did not have manmade electrons — “nothings” — which in turn use minute amounts of energy, other “nothings.” Two or three decades ago, the idea of the “knowledge industry” (or less commonly, the notion of “informatics”) was introduced to explain the important shift that had occurred in contemporary society, that information and knowledge rather than the amassing of people and energy had become a source of progress and wealth. One could say that the idea of the knowledge industry expressed the dawning awareness that we were entering the era of “nothings.” For what is knowledge but a “nothing,” something very small that can have enormous effects? Today, millions of people are devoting their time and mental energy to the knowledge industry, and “nothings” are emerging as the true occupation of humans. Those who know how to use “nothings,” mental or physical, are becoming the new rich. Their wealth is based on the formulation that with a little you can get a lot. In their actions, they disregard the earlier contradictory thinking on energy, still regarded in many quarters as the whole truth about energy, that, as the first principle of thermodynamics asserts, “nothing is lost, nothing is created, and all is transformed.”

4 The Task Of Today

In this book we have been studying the generation of wealth, asking how it is possible to get back more than one’s “investment,” which is to say: something for nothing. The very idea of the generation of wealth is possible only because we do not think in terms of strict equivalence but in terms rather of a functional transformation not bound by the principles of thermodynamics — receiving as much as one gives and giving as much as one receives. Where does the awareness underlying the idea of a generation of wealth come from? Homo Sapiens needed only to return to himself and to recognize that the mind is not an energy system regulated by the principles of thermodynamics (which of course regulate some of the behaviors of cosmic energy). For in our mind, we use only “nothings,” and everything we have generated, everything we have accomplished, results from these “nothings.” We therefore have always known how to generate wealth. Today, we make professions out of generating different kinds of wealth. The most conspicuous of these professions are in the financial world in capitalist societies, where it is possible to accumulate a fortune by thinking up a process (like “greenmail,” the feigned acquisition of a company) and devoting oneself to it for a few months. But the best example of a “nothing” to consider comes from the thinking of Albert Einstein, who in 1905 found that matter (m) was energy (E), and calculated their relationship to be E=mc2, where c is the speed of light. In this formula, which sprang from the “nothings” of his mind, he gave the world access to nuclear energy (then called atomic energy), a source of energy that was

The Generation of Wealth

virtually unlimited in comparison with the cost of his mental activity. Einstein’s formula is a supreme example of getting a lot for a little. But it should be noted that the opposite type of exchange, getting very little for a great deal, a negative yield, also exists. Two prominent examples, creating concern among many ordinary people, are the areas of medical “care” and of accumulating armaments. In medicine, the high costs are defeating the very purpose of medicine, as it becomes less and less affordable by most of the sick people in the “advanced” countries. As for the accumulation of armaments everywhere, if the armaments are not used, then too much is being spent to get nothing, but if they are used, the result would hardly be acceptable to the citizens of the 20th century. One might imagine Homo Economicus turning to Homo Sapiens to say: “I do not understand. Can’t the areas of medicine and armaments be more favorably organized?” And we might imagine Homo Sapiens replying: “Let me think.” These examples indicate that we are in a period of transition and that past conceptions are still at work in some institutions not yet touched by “nothings” and their superlative powers.

The New Entrepreneurs Although it is clear that the generation of wealth has always taken place among humans, it is also clear that only very

100

4 The Task Of Today

recently has it become an awareness that is available to everyone. For this awareness actually to be reached by the majority of humans will take the time it will take. Education can likely reduce the time involved, quite considerably. This is the problem to which we will turn in the next chapter. But for now, we must recognize that the possibilities of generating wealth has reached only a small fraction of humanity. One group of these people are called “entrepreneurs,” and the experiments they have created in the past twenty years will teach us a great deal about the generation of wealth. We learn the most, I believe, from the experiments that have failed. An “entrepreneur” is a person whose Homo Sapiens component changes into Homo Economicus as soon as there appears an idea that can contribute to the market in which “things” are bought or sold. Homo Sapiens seizes the idea, and immediately Homo Economicus takes over, devoting himself to “marketing” the idea, to making a “thing” out of it that can be sold to generate wealth, for himself and possibly for others. Changing the “nothing” of an idea into a thing and a working institution, involves a mixture of “nothings” that consume the entrepreneur’s time and require a variety of other activities (physical, social, commercial), all of which also absorb the entrepreneur’s attention, for they seem to be essential to the creation of the particular vehicle one needs to take an idea to the marketplace. In all that activity and noise, however, the dynamics underlying the generation of wealth is lost, and the “entrepreneur” often misses his or her chance of coming into intimate contact with the essence of the process that transforms an idea into wealth. The entrepreneur may succeed in the transformation, but dizzied by all he or she must attend to, will

101

The Generation of Wealth

likely not gain the awareness of the true workings of the accomplishment. There will be no awareness of awareness. In terms of the market’s criteria, a successful institution is one that produces wealth for the entrepreneur and for a number of other people. The analysis of a market success stresses such objective components as management, quality of goods, advertising, supply, and distribution. These components are perhaps necessary elements of the success, but they are not sufficient to explain it. The idea or ideas must come first, as must their fit with the challenge they may meet. That is, there must be a situation to which the idea is a response. For wealth to be generated, the initial “nothing” then must become a chain of “nothings” which, like the initial ideas, work by themselves. Within this chain, there is room for acts, activities, meetings, and also the exploitation of already available solutions. For everything cannot be created from scratch. Otherwise, a single person (or group of people) could not accomplish all that needs to be done to transform ideas into institutions. The number of patents asked for every year is an index of the many potential entrepreneurs there are today. They can all contribute to the generation of wealth, for themselves, in trying to exchange an idea for wealth, and for society, in trying to make something new or something that works better.

102

4 The Task Of Today

The Industrial Revolution, And The Commercial And Global Revolution To understand the nature of generating wealth today, we need to recognize the differences between the current economic revolution, and the first economic revolution, called the industrial revolution. In advanced countries, we see modifications, alterations, and transformations of the structures, routines, and perspectives created to support the industrial revolution, the first economic revolution, so as to make the environment right for the second economic revolution going on today. This revolution is more commercial than industrial, for its products are not ends in themselves but gain their value rather from their capacity to expand trade and commerce to keep generating more wealth. Today, the right kind of generation is the one that never stops. Todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s economic revolution is a constantly changing one whose arena is the whole globe. Formerly, a father would try to generate wealth so that his progeny would be able to live comfortably without engaging in the work of generating wealth. But today no such enterprise is viable. Continuing progress in production, design, dissemination, and other factors (brought about by the products of the second economic revolution), regularly enables newcomers to challenge established entities. Competition is no longer based on price alone; better service, for example, may now be the decisive element determining whether one continues doing business with a certain supplier. No one any longer can be ensured of a monopoly, and the largest

103

The Generation of Wealth

establishments are prone to collapse if they relax their attention and do not keep abreast of developments over a sufficiently broad area — the area, in fact, of the globe. As Detroit car makers can testify, a global economy is making much greater demands on corporations than did regional, national, or provincial economies. However successful previous actions may have been, past experience can no longer serve as a guide securing the near future. A constant recasting of one’s ideas and the range of one’s action is needed to use the products now being developed in more and more areas of the globe to serve an ever-expanding consumer population and a world market.

The Exploration Of Abundance And The Limits Of Luxury Today, in advanced commercial societies, large sections of the population have moved so far beyond the task of survival that they have taken their lives to the point of indulging in luxury. To complain about this, to characterize it as greed and selfishness when many people on earth have not yet been guaranteed survival, is to divert ourselves from examining first an important meaning of the universe of Homo Economicus. Our moral judgment can follow our intellectual understanding. A taste for luxury, for the useless, constitutes an experiment in the realm of economics. What is possible in the economics of today and what is not? These are the basic questions posed by the contemporary experiments of the wealthy. In our times, in advanced economies, phenomena such as “built-in adolescence” and “disposable goods” are all concerned with luxury and are far

104

4 The Task Of Today

from the survival-oriented concerns of the past. The collective acceptance or rejection of the new values inherent in these phenomena is one element being tested by the experiments in luxury; as evolution shows us, only that which is “viable” will remain in use. Homo Economicus acquires experience by watching what is happening and learning from it (rather than by praising or condemning activities one likes or dislikes, which is appropriate in other social areas). An important lesson Homo Economicus has learned already from the experiments in luxury is that a proper generation of wealth is based upon an economic dynamic that by itself manages to correct the functioning of the forces involved. In other words, the generation of wealth contains a “self-correcting” element. In the pursuit of luxury, for example, it has become clear that a certain amount of litter is acceptable but that beyond this limit litter becomes pollution, and action is instigated to stop it. Put differently, certain results of the pursuit of luxury are unacceptable; in the economic realm, the value of luxury is balanced by other values. Thus, recycling made its appearance to meet the challenge of pollution after garbage collection was overwhelmed and became too costly a solution. Similarly, when the need for newsprint consumed far too many trees for pulp and paper, reforestation followed deforestation. Oil spills have become intolerable, and a new industry (one of whose instruments is oil-eating bacteria, a laboratory-developed “nothing”) has been created to deal with them. Strip mining has been allowed to continue on the guarantee that the landscape will be returned to its original condition at the expense of the mining company. Car manufacturers, who have been responsible for some air pollution, are now required to reduce

105

The Generation of Wealth

the pollution-creating emissions of cars by installing a special chemical process in the muffler. Chemical plants must now concern themselves with waste disposal, which was not their responsibility in the past, and because cleaning operations have become too costly, plants will try not to pollute, unless they cannot do otherwise. In a world in which Homo Economicus is not as clearly at work as are Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber, many consequences and results are still to be discovered in the operations of the economic realm. It seems clear already from the example we have discussed that the unsuccessful attempts to make people accept as necessary and unalterable the consequences of current economic activity — in this instance, that pollution is the necessary price for economic progress — reveals the existence of a standard of truth in economics just as there are logics in thinking and in actions. In the activities of Homo Sapiens, for example, no scientist can get away with cheating in research; once uncovered, the investigator is forever discredited. Among the products of Homo Faber, there is an even faster way of being discredited — by claiming for a product or invention what it cannot perform; that object is forever rejected. In economics, the criteria constituting an economic logic are not yet as clear or as immediately operative. When more of the public are appraised of the pervasiveness of economic exchange, experience and logic will impose an ethic on this activity, and truth will descend in the economic arena. Then there will be no need to police polluters, manufacturers will install measures to deal with pollution in their plant designs and in the disposal of plant wastes. They will understand that air and water, soil and agriculture exist for reasons other than their manufacturing

106

4 The Task Of Today

needs, and they will need no governmental agency to tell them, just as research scientists (with rare exceptions) need no one to tell them that they must not cheat.

The Tools Of True Wealth This example, of how the pursuit of luxury among the well-to-do engenders actions that deal with the public good, shows that generating wealth, when fully actualized, becomes a collective process, even though the most visible component in the process is the fact that an individual or a group of people become rich. We can also say that this visible richness may be only a symptom, not in and of itself the real wealth being generated. Successive developments in the generation of wealth create the road to abundance for all. We noted earlier that anyone who invents a gadget that reduces either the energy or time required for a certain operation, is truly generating wealth. The history of Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s invention of tools or instruments is testimony to the constant and continuous generation of wealth over human history from the moment Man left the instinctual realm of animals, and this generation has persisted with or without the certainty that an individual or group would become rich. The generation of human wealth took quantum jumps when: 1

tools were conceived as instruments to provide help;

2 fire was mastered and made easily available;

107

The Generation of Wealth

agriculture replaced hunting and gathering;

4 the domestication of animals became routine; 5 shelters were conceived as structures to be built from materials in the environment; 6 clothing replaced nakedness or the use of hides, thus allowing humans to migrate to any spot on earth; 7

the wheel and animal traction increased the speed of individual work and group migrations;

it became possible to mine underground minerals, for compounds that could be fired to yield metals, or salt that helped the brain do its work;

wind-energy was utilized on sails, making possible travel offshore, thereby opening the rest of the planet for conquest and enabling the interchange of knowledge from peoples formerly isolated from each other;

10 trade and industry were merged, creating commerce for the increasing populations scattered on the earth; 11 energy became a usable concept and a science was created to study it and technologies invented to exploit it, with new forms of energy being added as research progressed; 12 evolution became a commanding concept so that change rather than permanence penetrated the fabric of living on earth;

108

4 The Task Of Today

13 time became a commodity that could replace energy as an entity to exchange to earn one’s living; 14 electrons were used for the control and governing of industries, and humans saw themselves as redundant in areas in which their presence once seemed to be essential; 15 survival on the scale of the planet became the last stage in the disappearance from Man’s psyche of the concern with survival. This short and incomplete list is sufficient to reveal the individual and collective interchanges that have stimulated the generation of wealth with the various involvements of Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus — either individually or in combinations of two or, as at present, all three regularly. About these and all other such interchanges we can say that the generation of wealth takes place whenever the new is considered, either for simple examination (by Homo Sapiens alone), or for the ways in which something works (by Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber together), or for its capacity of being improved or of improving the way of life (by Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus working in conjunction).

Bureaucracies, Traditions, And The Unknown In the past, it often was necessary to be reckless when entering the unknown. A person took great risks and met with only occasional success. The tendency today is to “plan” for weeks, months, and years ahead — sometimes meticulously and

109

The Generation of Wealth

frequently with specialists — so as to reduce as much as possible the risks of failure. Governments and large establishments spend a great deal of time attempting to control the future by having as many activities as possible scheduled in advance and by imposing deadlines on what does not yet exist. In effect, they try to treat the unknown future as if in fact it was known, that is, a duplication of the past. In this process, bureaucracies which treat the future as a repetition of the past, replace task forces (groups created to face new challenges) and adjust as best they can to what comes. A semblance of permanence and constancy appears to be injected into fluid and unforeseeable circumstances, and a spirit of “tradition” is thus created by ad hoc regulations obviously formulated at a certain date for a specifically perceived need of the moment. Yet such “traditions” often come to seem to many to contain a more searching analysis of changing reality than a direct, fresh look at that reality. The turmoil created in sectors of the economy of socalled free enterprise countries when “deregulation” was instituted by administrative legislation were symptoms of several important phenomena: that “traditions” can be eliminated overnight; that regulations established nonregulation; and that imposing the need for watchfulness in the so-called deregulated sectors meant managers had to learn how to adjust to what comes. This last element has brought back into commerce and industry the “adventurism” of earlier times, a characteristic I have labeled entrepreneurship.

110

4 The Task Of Today

Economic Experiments Of The USA And The Soviets The different economies of the USA and the Soviets are actually contrasting experiments on how to improve the generation of wealth in a society. We must still develop the criteria to evaluate these experiments. In a determinedly commercial society like the United States, where “the business of the country is business,” it is possible to see, as if projected one after the other on a large screen, the efforts to discover empirically what is good for the members of society through an enormous emphasis on material well-being in all sectors of life. A government open through lobbying to the pressures of the leaders (and beneficiaries) of commerce and industry, enacts laws that promote a moment-to-moment dynamic equilibrium between the numerous social forces shaping the immediate future (at least its economic aspects). The collective experiment the United States is conducting on behalf of the whole planet is attempting to understand the multiple effects, in all areas, of emphasizing and encouraging the efforts of Homo Economicus. But stressing economic components in every societal situation cannot take place without diminishing the work of other components. In such a society, which calls itself “open” because it regards economic success as the prime measure of an individual, Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber are given less of a chance to express themselves and their work tends to be done by

111

The Generation of Wealth

“volunteers,” people who can afford to contribute their time and energy. A commercial society like the United States simply presumes that it will develop the values cherished in the past and in other societies — the values of the arts, the dance, the theater — and will develop them even more richly than before because the economic element in human activity makes sense to the people investing in the arts. “Open” commercially (to a certain extent), this society takes for granted that it is “open” in every area, for everything. Time will tell. At this moment, the experiment goes on, and whoever is interested can learn from observing it. Another economic experiment, comparable in size and dedication, is taking place in the Soviet Union. The directed economy of the Soviet experiment is teaching us about the possibilities and hindrances that accompany the bureaucratic implementation of successive five-year plans. Homo Sapiens can study the many facets in this experiment, and the conclusions that are drawn will differ according to the perspective of the observer. An adherent to the doctrines underlying the experiment will ask for more time to see if the long-term projections are either invalid (meanwhile open to corrections) or confirmed by the technocrats who gather the evidence and interpret it. An opponent to the doctrines can work only by comparisons, saying that system A is better than system B. But such an argument cannot stand by itself because it necessarily will be based on premises dictated by habit and taste.

112

4 The Task Of Today

Fundamentally, we have no organized standards to judge these and other experiments. We have the experiments themselves to show us the extent to which they can grasp the realities of the economic universe in which they live, without the benefit of a cultivated and educated Homo Economicus concerned with truth and with taking steps knowingly. In all the economic experiments going on on earth at this historical moment, the most conspicuous aspect of them is that none are considered to be experiments aimed at disclosing certain realities. They are proposed rather as doctrinal implementations. As such, the experiments are all equally good or bad, and they will remain so until there is a “platform,” an array of achievements, that give widespread meaning to the activities of Homo Economicus. Such a platform has been elaborated for both Homo Sapiens (the aggregate of all the sciences) and Homo Faber (the aggregate of inventions adopted by the public). Assessing the contributions of the various experiments to improve the generation of wealth is also complicated by the fact that ideologies at work in the minds of their respective proponents frame the proposals they draw from the evidence. Then, when improving yields depends upon revising ideology, the emotions usually block any ideological change.* *

From such distortions and refusals we can see that Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus do not represent the whole of Man and that the remainder may be as powerful as these three components put together. Indeed, once the experiments in the generation of wealth lead to some success and some stabilization, inquisitive men will likely begin a new study to explore the ways in which affectivity and the psyche mold the human universe, and Affective

113

The Generation of Wealth

A review of history tells us that cultures and civilizations vanish after one or more very productive periods, which may extend over centuries. From the perspective developed here, the process of decline can be explained as the exhaustion of an absolute that provides the central focus of a culture. In our present Western civilization, it is possible to say that the socioeconomic absolute — which has produced the modern cultures centered on the appeal of wealth, emphasizing wealth to the point that almost all young people desire above all to have access to more and more easy money — is taking people and institutions towards ready bankruptcy. Even the symbol of monetary wealth, the banks, now collectively face the possibility of demise. Easy enrichment tempted them too, and the banking systems of the West have become creditors to a point that they and their debtors might sink together. Economic excesses and financial orgies can easily claim the end of Western civilization — a conclusion contemplated with horror from within but with glee by the doctrinaire communists who were told more than a century ago that capitalism would fall from its own excesses. A less melodramatic view of the same reality would see the experiment of Western civilization, conducted by inexperienced adventurers, as the price that has to be paid to acquire mastery of the creative acts of Homo Economicus. During the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, the West was inebriated with the conquests stimulated by the intellectual absolute, the presumption that Reason provided the appropriate measure for all activity. During Man and Psychic Man may emerge clearly among living humans. Of course, they do not need to be fully blown to make their presence felt. Whenever the emphasis on Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus can be reduced, there is a place for emotions and passions to guide one’s life and make it more open to the affective component.

114

4 The Task Of Today

the 19th and 20th centuries, Western civilizations subordinated the intellect to the social absolute, making Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber the servants of Homo Economicus. Pursuing this absolute, the West spilled over its boundaries and made itself attractive to all the colonized peoples of the world. So far, one might say, so good. But recently, in believing it could finance virtually all the economic advances of the world by supplying funds at certain rates of interest, the West gave itself the opportunity to discover that such maneuvers are insufficient to bring about economic advancement. Both the bankers of the West and the leaders of Third World governments correctly understood that borrowed funds expedited material progress here and there, and many saw visible improvements in their countries. But neither the leaders nor the bankers recognized another lesson of history, that Homo Economicus, the student of yields, can be successful only after Homo Sapiens has lived through a period of hegemony, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by Homo Faber. Whenever such a background is missing or insufficient, economic progress is short-lived and contributes little to the self-sufficiency of new nations. Homo Economicus makes sense and can function properly only when the awareness that perceives it rests on a past of long experiments, which represents successive absolutes each integrating and subordinating previous ones. I introduce this proposition, despite its apparent abstractness, because it is important to realize that Homo Economicus cannot operate, as it were, in a vacuum. Homo Economicus needs Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber to succeed, and it needs the experience of

115

The Generation of Wealth

seeing humans pursue different absolutes in an effort to master their world. It is the history of the West over, say, the past 1,000 years that has led to the awareness of Homo Economicus. This is a history, as we have seen, of changing absolutes. To recapitulate briefly: Up to the Renaissance, the West was under the sway of a theological absolute. Theologies explored the individual’s path to salvation, and they concentrated on the power of charity and the devotion to ideals. Theologians advised kings to act in faith, and successfully persuaded them to undertake quite unwarranted projects (such as the Crusades) for which there had been no adequate preparation. Homo Sapiens had not yet codified how to set forth such programs of action. No one any longer disputes that the excesses of the Middle Ages served to exhaust the possibilities of soul-searching, that God’s grace remained selective and scarce however single-minded one’s faith and devotion. The exhaustion of the theological absolute made room for the explosion of a new awareness of Man’s place in nature. Focusing on the light of reason, the Renaissance gave Western Man a new lease on life, and in three centuries led to the deification of Reason, and then to the demise of Reason’s hegemony. During the Renaissance, Western Man discovered that there were myriads of subjects for his contemplation, and he plunged into them with a frenzy. The intellect became the goal of human endeavor. Being a scientist or a philosopher, a worshiper of Reason, was better than being a priest or a soldier. No

116

4 The Task Of Today

ordination was needed to engage in the pursuits of Reason, though devotion was necessary. Even noblemen and priests could join the new cohorts of naturalists. While faith had to be protected against contamination from other faiths, thinking could be fertilized by any other thinker engaged in a similar dialogue with nature. Men became intellectually equal by virtue of their findings, and no one questioned their origins and faith. Not only were heathens like the Greeks and Romans accepted as masters in certain studies of nature, but also infidels like the Arabs and even the Jews would be hailed for their scientific contributions. An Arabic name, Algebra, was chosen to name a whole branch of mathematics, so that no one would forget it was owed to the Arab genius. It is the long experience with the dynamics and achievements of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber that has led to the emergence of Homo Economicus. As we shall see in the next chapter, it may be possible through a proper education to instill deliberately in learning students mastery of these three attributes of Man.

The Haves And Have-Nots, And The Revolution Of Awareness In past societies, different structures created different social inequalities. Today, the most conspicuous inequality is between the haves and the have-nots, an economic inequality that also has a social dimension. When social and economic inequalities have been successfully challenged by physical revolutions â&#x20AC;&#x201D; military, popular, palace â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the reason has been that enough

117

The Generation of Wealth

people have seen that an inequality could be overturned. Put in more general terms, they have seen that the principles or absolutes guiding the rulers were different than the absolutes in which they now believed. Today, however, the absolute guiding the haves and the have-nots is the same. In such a situation, revolution cannot be accomplished through physical action. Instead, it must take place in the minds of people, indeed in almost every one of the five or six billion individuals who will be living on earth at the end of the 20th century. The revolution required today is a new kind of revolution, even though, like all previous revolutions, it starts with one person and rolls through the ranks of people in society till it reaches everybody. The revolution must be triggered by a number of awarenesses that all people — or at least most of the sane and healthy inhabitants of the earth — are equipped to have. It is an inner revolution. Today, free, universal, compulsory education is written into the laws of most nations precisely because there is a universal perception that all people are endowed with intellectual powers and the abilities to learn — that all people, in other words, have the attribute of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber. It seems impossible that we shall not acknowledge soon that Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber have opened the way to Homo Economicus, that all people now have the capacity to exchange their time into greater yields of something that has value to them, and that universal, free, compulsory education of the attribute of Homo Economicus is similarly the responsibility of society — indeed, of a world society seeking to educate itself and

118

4 The Task Of Today

the new generations to live more consciously the environment of Homo Economicus. Within the social absolute of nationalism, Homo Economicus has manifested itself in many ways: in organized labor; in corporate responsibilities (serving shareholders and also the environment); in care for the aged, the sick, and the young; in cooperation between governments, businesses, and labor unions. But today we can look beyond nationalism and see that it is possible to develop supranational institutions to eradicate plights once accepted as inevitable. International institutions like the U.N.’s World Health Organization and its Food and Agricultural Organization have already shown that problems can be tackled on a worldwide scale and that some of them can be solved. Consider the elimination of the epidemics of smallpox and the inauguration of the agricultural revolution in southeast Asia. The newly emerging outlook, a world outlook, has generated successful experiments, proving that if problems are tackled at the global scale, there is a chance to solve them. As long as the social absolute of nationalism lingers — today many leaders are rigorous in their support of this outdated perspective — we shall live with one foot in the past of a fragmented earth, where nationalities fervently believe they have a long (if not eternal) lease on life, and the other foot in the emerging civilization of the near future, in which Man can live his most basic attributes as an inhabitant of the earth (until perhaps, he makes yet one more turn and acknowledges that he also is a cosmic being, a creature of the energy permeating the universe).

119

The Generation of Wealth

To work on the generation of wealth in the proper setting today requires that one systematically and persistently focus on the habitat of the earth and think always of humans rather than of the divisions and characteristics that maintain a hindering fragmentation. It is the human focus that will bring about the timely and correct revolution needed to hasten the transformation of our habitat into a world collectivity where the differences compatible with the descending future will remain and those hindering evolution will disappear.

The Challenge Of Homo Ecomonicus Let us summarize some of the findings that can be gleaned from the surveys in the first four chapters of our discussion. We saw that in the last two hundred years or so, when the social absolute absorbed the minds of the most active members of the Western communities, Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber individually were not capable of extending consciousness to raise the standard of living of the masses. Man thinking and Man doing, each independently, were not enough to see that the critical issue was one of exchange and yield. There was need for a new awareness of what had to be achieved, or was fitfully being achieved by Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber working as a blended entity â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the awareness of Homo Economicus. We saw that as people became more demanding consumers, wealth was generated merely by expanding their numbers and then meeting their demands. This leapfrogging of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber produced a planetary clientele for an

120

4 The Task Of Today

expanding system of production that for all practical purposes reached every spot on earth, surveying all its riches and the new demands waiting to be met. We saw that a problem soon emerged: While the number of customers was increasing, the resources to serve them were being depleted. Desperate moves of conservation and restoration were only palliatives postponing the day of reckoning. It became clear to many that unless a rapid new shift in understanding occurred in the minds of many people, an exponential growth of population sharing an almost constant production of goods and food would bring certain disaster. We have seen that the contribution of the maturing Homo Economicus in each of us can prepare us to select the realistic routes for meeting the vast economic challenges we face today, as we come to the end of the 20th century. And that we can in fact do this, even though it means abandoning the absolutes that make us comfortable and developing new ways of thinkings on many fundamental issues. But what are the practical steps we can take now? This is the challenge to which we turn. I believe we have the inner power â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and this is the power we must cultivate â&#x20AC;&#x201D; to meet it. Before we are forced to confront the bankruptcy of our cherished institutions and the excesses of our material greed and selfishness, before we see Western civilization join the preceding cultures that have vanished, we have the option of examining the central instrument of evolutionary change, education, and give it the form and tenor that will enable it to transform a

121

The Generation of Wealth

decline into a leap forward, in just one generation, for both the rich and the poor of today. If we make the appropriate changes in education, we shall develop a continuous generation of true universal wealth, and give our planet the privilege of being the habitat, everywhere, of true humans, fully conscious of their evolution.

122

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

The preceding four chapters have been analytical and historical. We have sought to understand and observe Homo Economicus in the developments that have affected the generation of wealth (particularly those involving the uses of energy). Now we shall try to transfer our new understandings to various problems of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s world. Is it possible to find solutions that will produce better yields â&#x20AC;&#x201D; better in the sense of getting more from less? Is it possible to train the Homo Economicus in all of us so that we will become more skillful at producing greater yields? Is it possible to create situations in which all of us, in developed and Third World countries alike, can become generators of wealth, for ourselves and for our world? Is it possible for all humans, using the combined skills of Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus, to shape their individual and collective lives more deliberately?

123

The Generation of Wealth

These are the kinds of questions we shall be considering. I believe, and hope to show, that the answer to all of them is yes. I shall argue that the awareness of Homo Economicus, in conjunction with the technological “nothings” now available to us, can transform the organization of human life. In this chapter, we concentrate on examples from education. I do this for at least two reasons. First, education is the primary tool of evolution. It is through education that we collectively gain the tools and the awarenesses that enable us all to understand and meet the challenges of life. Second, I am an educator and have worked for many years on finding solutions to a number of essential tasks whose resolution still confounds most educators: the task of learning to read, of learning mathematics, and of learning a nonnative (or “foreign”) language. In and of themselves, these solutions represent valid examples of successfully meeting vast challenges by generating a great deal from very little. As we shall see in a later chapter, they also represent, I believe, the easiest and least costly approach to an evolutionary development that will bring about a permanent and reasonable generation of wealth in Third World countries. In what follows, I probably cannot avoid the impression, for some, of self-promotion, since the solutions to the educational challenge of literacy, mathematics, and nonnative languages are solutions I have developed. The truth is that I know of no other solutions based on the same principles. In any event, readers should take me at my word when I say that the source of these solutions does not matter; what matters is each solution.

124

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

Some Principles Of Education In any effort to educate, we need to be aware of the skills and capacities of the learners. What we offer to be learned should be fitted to these skills and capacities. It perhaps is fair to say that no educational system has yet grasped the strengths that all young people bring with them to the classroom. The following brief comments will help illuminate the perspectives that guide my thinking — and should, I believe, guide everyone’s thinking — in meeting an educational challenge. 1 The Qualities Of Memory We may reasonably begin with memory, since it so often plays so large a part in education. What are the characteristics — the limits and strengths — of memory? Memory had its greatest use before the advent of the printing press. Until that time, the oral tradition prevailed (even though in some cases handmade copies of the essential components of a civilization were available). The successful perpetuation of the oral tradition demanded that a human being memorize a spoken text perfectly. So mankind learned to trust an educated memory, which meant a memory that knew it had no right to alter the text. Cultivating a memory to provide unwavering fidelity (and conformity) guaranteed one a prominent place in a clan or tribe, even a nation.

125

The Generation of Wealth

Such qualities of memory understandably led to an emphasis on stability, permanence, unchangeability. Little wonder that evolution was not a preoccupation of the thousands of generations of humans during the oral tradition. Far more valuable was learning how to commit everything to memory verbatim, with total respect for each word as heard and for its place in a string of words. The shift to permanent marks, which came with the printing press and made dependence on memory far less compelling, had pervasive, long-range consequences. Release from the slavish necessity of being faithful to memory brought about the release of creative energy and led to the study of what could advantageously be changed. The constancy and sameness that were stressed in a world in which memory was the primary tool of transmitting knowledge, no longer held sway. Now we could leave to memory only that which we could not invent, and we could entrust everything else to our abilities to invent. New knowledge thus could gain importance, and it accordingly was developed. We all live in the wake of the printing press. The impact upon Homo Sapiens of the invention of this new tool by Homo Faber cannot easily be measured. It has been and still is enormous, primarily because it released mental energy that could be directed at devising new inventions and new implementations. Memory, then, is integrally related to constancy, fidelity, sameness â&#x20AC;&#x201D; to what is fixed and past, to the old â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and not to the new.

126

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

2 The Commonness Of Forgetting When we consider memory, we need also to consider forgetting, which as everyone knows is more common than remembering. Forgetting has often been regarded a defect of the mind and exercises have been devised to improve oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s capacity for retention. But instead of trying to fight forgetfulness, the failure of memory, I suggest that we consider forgetting an inherent component of memory and look at its positive qualities. Since forgetting exists, and exists for all humans, does this not indicate that some things are worthy of retention and others better forgotten? From this perspective, is it not possible to develop this criteria for identifying material that should be retained and the material from which we deliberately should withdraw the energy that would keep it in our memory? Putting these observations together, we can see that education should not cultivate memory, which reinforces the past and conformity, but should cultivate inventiveness, which seeks new understandings and better ways of doing things. We can further see that memory should be relegated to a limited area in education â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that it should be used only for that which we cannot invent. 3 The Minds Of Very Young Children Children bring their weak memories with them to school. What else do they bring? Observation of very young children shows us that in our early years we all take full responsibility for our own learning, on many planes and in many circumstances. We know the things

127

The Generation of Wealth

that are right for us to do, and we learn to do them, postponing other things we cannot do even if we see older people doing them easily. The full impact of these apparently matter-of-fact observations may be hard to grasp for a reader who has not seriously entertained the idea that children teach themselves what they know and that to accomplish what young children accomplish is a major achievement. In early childhood we are as much Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber and even Homo Economicus as we shall ever be â&#x20AC;&#x201D; regarding matters that are at our level. We do many things so well, mainly in the field of somatic enquiry, that they remain available to us for all the years of our lives. We learn to sit, stand, walk, and climb. Then we learn to run and throw, and at the same time, to speak our native language. A remarkable aspect of all this learning is that later in life we have no clue of how we did it. It is as if we have a somatic memory that is not linked to our powers of explicit evocation. This somatic memory retains what we learned and allows us to recall it, but it does not remember deeply enough to enable us to verbalize how we learned or, in fact, even that we did learn. But we did. Each of us, for example, learned to do what we had to do with our muscles and bones and balance in order to walk. Each of us did what we had to do with our sound-making apparatus, with our memory, our ability to connect sound with meaning, and so forth, to learn to talk. In early childhood, we always use our need to know and our sense of truth, and we experiment extensively to find the criteria that make learning possible. In fact, all young children wherever they are and whatever their environment, learn the same

128

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

essential skills in approximately the same order and at comparable speeds. In young children, Homo Sapiens knows by using the proper criteria; Homo Faber does smoothly what must be done to generate the many spontaneous skills needed to move on; and Homo Economicus seeks the proper procedures so that one skill leads to another and all are integrated for the best functioning at the minimal cost of energy and time. All this happens before children enter school. The learning situation is quite different after most grown children have been detoured by either a formal education based on memorization and faithful reproduction (so-called rote learning) or by environmental demands pushing them into jobs that require all their available energy. Most grown children no longer practice the powerful learning skills they once utilized so well, the very skills that enable them to be on top of things. The implications of these comments are clear. First, we need to stop detouring people and forcing on them the wholly inadequate techniques of memorization and routine employment. Second, we need to develop ways of working that keep individuals in contact with their creative powers. In other words, we need to create the educational methods that give everyone the chance to extend freely the very successful spontaneous learning of early childhood. 4 The Equality Of Children In the preceding sentence, I used the word “everyone” deliberately. It was not a touch of casual, sentimental rhetoric. The achievement of most young children — say, in learning to

129

The Generation of Wealth

walk and talk — shows us that most newborns have a common capacity for developing and mastering their educational skills. Once we recognize this, we can quickly envision an international “classroom” of students who all come with equal opportunities. Of course, the historical developments of different groups are often very different and should not be equated. But the early education of all people should be related to the common, indeed universal attributes of Man — Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus. An education so designed will enable all people to confront with greater ease the tasks in their environment. Since we will be considering the educational needs of Third World countries in later pages, I should add that an education guided by the attributes of Man will do away with the need for less advanced peoples to recapitulate the history and achievements of advanced nations of the last 400 years. Every civilization need not repeat the history that has prepared Western civilization for the new global civilization that is emerging. Indeed, “old” advanced countries constantly discard so much, replacing it with something based on new principles, that the newly developed countries need to master only these new principles, so long as they are assimilated from “scratch.” This is the job that education has to guarantee. To summarize these observations: In the following pages, we will be concerned with the economics of education, with getting a lot for a little, for every human inhabiting the earth, by using the attributes that are in all of us. The examples will show, I

130

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

believe, that it is entirely possible to resolve important challenges so that the solutions are universally applicable and entirely practical. I am not proposing utopian solutions in these pages. The educational solutions described here are realistic and true because they are based on the attributes of Man.

A New Approach To Reading The approach to reading that I will explain has emerged from several attacks on illiteracy that I have developed over the years. In all of them, my aim has been to reduce the cost and time of learning to read and of gaining mastery over the written medium, and I have been able to do this, in all the solutions, to such an extent that the expenditures are no more than a fraction of what the public schools spend in time, cost, and effort — and with far less success, as the vast number of illiterates in the United States testifies. My latest proposal has the form of a microcomputer program. With this program no one can escape learning to read his or her native language in a matter of hours. I speak literally here — in a matter of hours. Further, the learning bypasses memorization, thus making literacy a skill which cannot be forgotten. This computer program, which I call “Infused Reading,” illustrates the role of Homo Economicus in clarifying what Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber together have not managed even to suspect: that the apparent problem of learning to read was a pseudo-challenge. Homo Economicus saw that it was possible to take the powers that allow a hearing, seeing person

131

The Generation of Wealth

to learn to speak and to link them to the skills needed to interpret the alternate, written medium used to record one’s language. That is, the powers used to learn to speak could become the basis for learning how to read. Reading thus becomes not a wholly new skill but the extension of an old, mastered skill into a new area. Once this linkage between speaking and reading is recognized, then the task becomes one of developing the means to realize it so that everyone who learns how to speak (assuming they can hear and see) can learn how to read. We need not discuss here the preparation of the material and its translation into a computer courseware. All that readers need to know about the material used to stimulate the skill of reading is that one or more texts are prepared containing all the written signs of a given language. If the language contains vowels and consonants, the vowels are treated first, for reasons we shall examine in a moment. Chinese, which does not have written vowels and consonants, requires a different attack, as does Japanese, which has three scripts (one consisting of Chinese characters, or Kanji, and two with syllables rather than consonants). Arabic and Hebrew use only consonants in their written forms and assume that the vowels needed to speak the words will be correctly surmised. The majority of newly written languages (including, of course, Western European languages) use the Latin alphabet or some variation of it, and we shall consider one of these languages here. Now, the economics in this approach to reading — its minimal cost in time and effort — is as follows. If, by learning to read a single text, we can make sense of reading and of the conventions

132

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

of writing, and if that skill is then transferred by the learner himself or herself to reading any other text whose contents are not beyond his or her experience, we can say that we have made a reader out of a nonreader, child or adult. (In terms of teaching reading, there is no difference between an illiterate adult or a child who has not yet learned how to read: both are illiterates, that is, nonreaders.) With the techniques and materials of Infused Reading, the process of learning how to read a single text (or the two or three needed for languages with more than seven vowels) and transferring the skill to another text takes a matter of hours. Clearly the monetary cost of such an operation per capita is equivalent to cents while the cost of any other approach is at least hundreds of dollars — in other words, a ratio of one to several ten thousands. Such a saving seems unbelievable to most people, for they do not consider the presence of Homo Economicus in the processes of learning, and their outlook on life lets them believe that only drill and repetition — only arduous, time-consuming extended effort — can lead to the acquisition of learning. The facts are otherwise and are the basis of Infused Reading, which in the case of Spanish, for example, can enable a nonreading student, adult or child, master the skill of reading in two hours, and do so without using any drill or repetition. (For languages with from two to four times as many vowels, the process would take up to eight hours.) In the field of travel, a number of technological advances have dramatically increased the speed with which distances can be traversed, and everyone takes the new current speed for granted. The Concorde effortlessly crosses the Atlantic in less

133

The Generation of Wealth

than three hours. Only five hundred years ago, sailing across the Atlantic took many weeks, at least a hundred times slower than the Concorde. In the field of reading, two technological advances have enabled us to reduce, by an equally dramatic ratio, the time it takes to learn to read. The first discovery was the insight that if we initially master vowels in and of themselves, then mastering the act of reading inevitably follows, as consonants are introduced one by one. The second discovery was the realization that the computer is an ideal means for an approach that aims at reading fluency and the ability to transfer what one had learned. The basis of this approach is to treat the written language as a variation of the spoken language that students already know. The first discovery required an insight that had escaped both traditional teachers of reading and the teachers who wanted to reform the traditional approaches to reading, for both were concerned with teaching rather than learning. That is, the teachers focused on what they themselves were doing and not on the learners. Since vowels can be uttered on their own and most consonants cannot (the very word, consonants, means with something), the skill of reading can be practiced on vowels without any reference to meaning or even to one’s language. Thus, it is a totally unambiguous activity and cannot lead to confusion. This is the reason Infused Reading begins with vowels. The next step is to select the consonants that with vowels form properly utterable syllables. The aggregates either form an actual word at that stage (in English, “to” and “do” are examples) or do so when other syllables are added to them. As

134

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

soon as enough contiguous words form phrases, the students say them and gain the feedback that what they now say is what they say spontaneously when they speak. As these experiences rapidly increase in number, they form the awareness in students that one’s speech has another form, a written form. Students recognize from the start that this written form is equivalent to their spoken language. I would also note that such a step-bystep conquest, which brings students to reading swiftly and directly, is accomplished without any fuss or any visible emotion, although students later may express their enthusiasm at owning a skill that opens up to them a new universe, the universe of books. The second discovery was made possible through the creation of the microcomputer in the mid-seventies. Although Infused Reading was first conceived in 1972, when it began as an animation film, a relatively costly form of presentation, it was fully realized only ten years later, when It became clear that computer programming was financially feasible while the cost of animation remained more or less prohibitive. (In either case, the cost of eradicating illiteracy would have been very small in comparative terms.) Because of the step-by-step, mathematical nature of the approach of Infused Reading, it is possible for the first time to make statements such as the following: “It takes 14 minutes to master the vowels of Spanish. It takes another 14 minutes to complete the job of letting an illiterate student read a text which will establish literacy in Spanish.” Testing the validity of these statements takes only a half hour. It is possible to put on a computer the set of all the vowels and necessary Spanish

135

The Generation of Wealth

consonants and phrases, and then to command the computer to present them in a random sequence and at different speeds. If new Spanish-speaking literates can correctly read all these elements, who would deny that they now own the skill of reading their language? To test the ability to transfer the skill they have learned, the computer then presents them with another text containing a number of new words and phrases (as well as some from the original text). The computer can transmit the text at three increasingly fast speeds, the last one being the right speed for literate natives. To complete the act of transferring and, in the process, of securing the skill of reading, the computer next offers two separate texts whose contents have nothing to do with the previous two texts, and displays the new texts at the speed comfortable to knowledgeable readers. This is all there is to the approach of Infused Reading. At the end, in a matter of hours, nonreaders are readers. Such microcomputer programs guarantee literacy because of their rigor and their realism â&#x20AC;&#x201D; their use of powers and capacities present in those who have learned to speak. It is only a matter of imagination to develop the computer coursewares to present all the languages of the world.

136

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

A New Approach To Mathematics Mathematics is a venerable school subject, and has a history in all civilizations and cultures, sometimes stretching over millennia. It is also an indispensable subject, for every day hundreds of millions of people devote some time to mathematics. Yet few benefit from it, and still fewer enjoy it. This situation raises two problems of economics for anyone concerned with education and the efficient use of time. One problem is obvious: “Should we continue to squander billions of hours of so many people for a result certainly not worth all that expense?” The other problem is more subtle, and more difficult to think through: “Should we not find ways of making the hours devoted to mathematics profitable, or even very profitable?” An answer to the second problem of course also answers the first. The first question has occasionally been answered by suggesting that mathematics be removed from the list of compulsory school subjects. When this proposal has been acted upon and mathematics becomes an elective, students have regretted the change. We might fairly think of students in such a situation as victims. It is a strange occurrence indeed that a society which as a whole mostly consists of mathematical illiterates, should nonetheless maintain mathematics in a prominent place in the school curriculum, even though it is a subject most people fear and even hate, and a subject, as they have learned from direct experience, that is not of great value in their education, which

137

The Generation of Wealth

mostly skirts it. Even the few who are good at mathematics do not necessarily make a career of it. Compared to the numbers exposed to it during years of elementary and secondary schooling, the numbers who pursue it are nearly negligible. The discussion among teachers of mathematics and curriculum designers since about 1880 concerning the value of mathematics as a school subject has never led to a real consensus. Meanwhile, the status quo has been maintained, mathematics continues to be taught with the same dismal results, and one generation after another pays the same high price of discomfort, buying with this expenditure almost no culture and very little skill in mathematics. Inadequacy in mathematics sometimes reaches the point that people actually boast of being mathematical illiterates! But what about the second problem? Is it possible to make the time spent in contact with mathematics both useful and pleasant? As someone who devoted much time in the last 50 years confronting this challenge, concretely as well as theoretically, I believe the answer is yes. Becoming a mathematician seems to me every humanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s birthright, and I consider my solution to the teaching of mathematics a tribute to the attributes of Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus in each of us. The advent of the microcomputer has added an important new element in this approach, creating the possibility of a courseware that can reach students in every school on earth. This courseware, which needs only a minimal amount of verbal

138

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

presentation, can enable students, young or old, in any region or country, to gain enough mathematics to meet the challenges of the modern world easily, quickly, and enjoyably. Mathematics today is a lively science in which thousands and thousands of workers produce more and more theorems every year. But the new theorems of math are not what we want to transmit to the young generation. Nor, on the other hand, do we want to give them the results produced by the early mathematicians who were working on far less sophisticated matters than are our contemporaries. It is this early work, of course, that usually is considered appropriate for the presumably unsophisticated minds of our present-day children and youth. But something different than either the newest theorems or the old findings is required. I propose four guidelines to direct our thinking. First, our aim should be to rethink the subject as a whole. We should give students the benefit of new ideas that shed light on the fundamentals and foundations of mathematics, and in this way pass on to them the understandings that are helpful in making sense of the mathematical challenges they will face. Put negatively, we may not need a historical framework to transmit to our young generation the distilled experience of mathematicians. Second, if there is something that permeates the whole of mathematics, this is the element we should hand over to the next generation. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Mathematizationâ&#x20AC;? is the label I have given to this feature of mathematics. With this word, I mean to suggest a

139

The Generation of Wealth

mental attitude that all mathematicians recognize as being part of their own mental work in mathematics. It is obvious that different mathematicians specialize in different mathematical areas and often are not equally comfortable in other areas. Yet it also seems clear that all mathematicians share a capacity for mathematization. This attribute, once articulated, necessarily remains prominent in one’s mental work whatever the level of mathematics at which one operates. My studies indicate that “mathematization” is a special awareness, an awareness of the dynamics of relationships. To act as a mathematician, in other words, is always to be aware of certain dynamics present in the relationships being contemplated. (It is precisely because the essence of mathematics is relationships that mathematics is suitable to express many sciences.) Thus, it is the task of education in mathematics to help students reach the awareness that they can be aware of relationships and of their dynamics. In geometry, the focus is on the relationships and dynamics of images; in algebra, on dynamics per se. It should be clear that we are dealing here with mental activities, not with this or that particular theorem or equation or mathematical operation. Once we conceptualize the algebras (the dynamics) in the various areas of mathematics, we can pass them on to students in the form of mental activities, in the practice of which students will discover that they themselves already own some mathematics. When teachers present mathematical challenges as mental dynamics rather than as items to be remembered, it costs almost nothing (in time, effort, or money) to reach levels of competence.

140

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

The third guideline is more general. We must acknowledge that we hold many preconceptions or even prejudices about learning in general, learning by the young, and learning mathematics. These preconceptions are justified only because we have not devoted ourselves to the study of either our own learning or the learning of others, the young especially. But once we study learning seriously, we find that there is no reason on earth why we should not do things differently in our schools and do them primarily in conformity with the actual learning taking place in front of us. As teachers, we should link what we do to what students spontaneously do well already, to operations that they mastered quite early in their lives and used to learn to walk, for example, or to speak (and indeed serves them forever). This general approach I call “the subordination of teaching to learning.” Today, everywhere, we unfortunately practice the opposite: We subordinate the learning of our students to our own teaching, which has very little to do with the students’ learning. The result, as we all know, is learning that is often haphazard and generally unsatisfactory to everyone concerned. The fourth guideline derives directly from Homo Economicus. If students show that they can confront more challenges in a given length of time, the challenges should be provided. This is an obvious point perhaps, but we all know from our schooling that it often is not taken seriously. Consider counting, a mathematical challenge to which I have developed a new solution. If 4 or 5 year-olds can learn to count beyond or 10 or 20, then teaching should not stop at these numbers, as is usually recommended. We instead should devise ways to encourage young people to continue their numeration.

141

The Generation of Wealth

I have done this in a computer course entitled “Visible and Tangible Math” which in a matter of hours gives very young children a full understanding of the reading and writing of numerals up to the hundreds of billions.* One reason this approach is successful is because it treats numeration as a chapter of language, which it is, and children have already mastered the challenge of language. Readers might be interested that the Homo Economicus in me has led me to calculate the mental cost of mastering “Visible and Tangible Math.” I do not want to take the reader’s time to explain my procedures here. I simply note that we pay in mental energy only for what we cannot invent. Perception, action, verbalizing, thinking, are all paid for by the general functioning of our soma and our minds, in terms of a dynamic that we displayed spontaneously from birth (and even before). However, anything we must hold in our mind — anything we must remember — requires a specific expenditure of mental energy, each of whose units I call an “ogden.” To remember my name, readers have to pay a single ogden for my last name or two ogdens for my complete name. I have established that in English the process of numeration up to, say, one trillion, costs 25 ogdens.** That is the price it costs children 5 or 6 years old, sitting for a few hours in front of the monitor, to store in their minds all they need to remember from *

The same system can be presented in a classroom on the chalkboard, but it takes somewhat longer.

A different number of ogdens is needed to master numeration in each language, the smallest cost being 14 ogdens for a group of languages including Mandarin and Amharic.

142

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

the first two disks of “Visible and Tangible Math.” (Part I of this two-part course consists of twelve disks.) Everything else on the first two disks engages the students in activities of invention rather “than of memory. Now, since my program reduces the mental cost of learning how to count up to perhaps a trillion, to 25 ogdens, it seems reasonable to insist that no student be forced to pay more. Yet of course almost all students do, which is one measure of the failure of education as we know it today. In any event, as students master the challenge of numeration with “Visible and Tangible Math,” they also engage in game-like activities whose mastery costs them “nothing.” Part II of “Visible and Tangible Math” takes on the challenge of teaching multiplication (after addition and subtraction have been thoroughly studied and mastered) in a new way that dispenses with the mentally costly, time-consuming, and unpleasant requirement of memorizing the multiplication tables. The approach is as follows. The course labels the set of integers studied in Part I as (I), and then shows that the even integers are doubles of the corresponding integers — or (2I). Doubling is the critical new awareness that students will work with under many guises as they master the fundamental relationships of mathematics. It allows students at this level to solve equations that in the regular school curriculum are usually examined a few years after the study of multiplication. The inverse of doubling is of course halving, and this operation is also practiced at this level, to the extent of solving linear equations. Just as doubling was applied to (I), it can be applied to (2I), yielding (4I). Similarly, halving (4I) yields (2I). Thus, doubling

143

The Generation of Wealth

doubling (I) produces (4I), and halving halving (4I) brings us back to (I). Another label for double-double is “multiply by 4”; a label for halving halving is either “multiply by 1/4” or “take 1/4 of.” Doing the doubling operation once more yields a multiplication by 8, which can be treated exactly as the previous doubling operations. Even though larger integers are involved, the process is the same. Multiplying by 8 (written as × 8) is seen to be equivalent to multiplying by 2 by 2 by 2 (× 2 × 2 × 2), or by 2 by 4 (× 2 × 4), or by 4 by 2 (× 4 × 2). It is just as easy to show that to multiply by 1/8 is equivalent to multiplying by 1/2 by 1/2 by 1/2 (× 1/2 × 1/2 × 1/2), or by 1/2 by 1/4 (× 1/2 × l/4), or by 1/4 by 1/2 (× 1/4 × 1/2). The comprehensive treatment of doubling allows young students to cover in about 3 hours material that in the school curriculum is given to 13 year-olds. As a by-product of the work on doubling, the students can extract the multiplication tables of 2, 4, and 8 from their own knowledge and do not need to memorize them. These tables also contain a great deal of mathematics, and this treatment enables students to meet other aspects of mathematics naturally as they move through the exercises and relate the new material to what they are working on. In the process, the students achieve as good a mastery of the material as do professional mathematicians. And they are still in primary school. The work on × 2, × 4, × 8, is only the beginning of the course. It next goes to × 10, × 100, and × 1000; then to × 5; then to × 3, ×

144

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

6, × 12; then to × 11 and × 9; and, finally, with only one intervening step of 7 × 7, to multiplication by × 7. Thus, the course covers and gives to students the mathematics of the multiplication of integers. At the appropriate point, it also introduces the inverse operators — first, × 1/2, × 1/4, and × 1/8; then × 1/3, × 1/6, and × 1/12; then × 1/10, × 1/100, × 1/1000, and × 1/5; and then × 1/11, × 1/9 and × 1/7. The result is that young students achieve an erudition encountered in those called prodigies. The students can do this because of the approach and its special wedding of principles and techniques. Such results have never been achieved before because no one has ever 1

conceptualized mathematics in this way, and

2 used the computer to transmit it. The rest of the arithmetic and algebra curriculum can be treated in a similar manner. The end result is that all sorts of profound economies are attained by young students who achieve a far greater mastery of elementary mathematics than do much older students using the current traditional approaches. To educate older students in geometry, I have been able to organize the contents of a number of regular textbook chapters in such a way that computer-made animated films can summarize in minutes what it takes weeks to cover in the textbook approach. I call this series “Animated Geometry,” and its impact is as much affective and aesthetic as it is intellectual. The aesthetic element is so strong that no one refuses to look at the unfolding of the filmic story, and simply by surrendering to it, students acquire a stock of images that can be used in

145

The Generation of Wealth

classroom discussions to extract as many theorems as the students are able to see — usually, at least as many as a textbook chapter offers. Through the animated film, the viewers’ minds are loaded with dynamic images of geometric shapes that can be made stationary at will and in this form read as propositions. The process by which the stationary images are created contains the validation of the propositions. Each proposition is a theorem about the area being studied. Because the dynamic images link the theorems to each other, they give meaning to each other and together represent an area of study. Viewers of “Animated Geometry” do not doubt that people can talk of geometric reality in the same way that they talk of their everyday experiences. Thus, “Animated Geometry,” by making its subject exciting and rewarding, meets the challenge of increasing the numbers of students who understand geometry. These examples show that it is possible to bring everyone, efficiently and economically, into an area that has always been presumed to require special gifts. The various approaches described here, using computer programs and animated films (as well as “Algebricks” and “Geoboards”*), provide teachers and schools with the means to improve vastly their presentation of mathematics and so change the attitude of all those students in the schools who never asked to be taught any mathematics and cannot see its utility.** To society’s continuing belief that it *

I have discussed the use of these techniques in my study Mathematics (Educational Solutions 1968).

It is true that economies in mathematical education outlined here are realized through the use of many technical instruments and that these economies are perhaps more needed by the countries of the Third World where the instruments are less available. The basic principles of this approach are nonetheless acceptable to Third World countries.

146

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

remains important to expose students to mathematics, we can now add the more rigorous assertion that mathematics should be as natural to a person as is language. Is it not true that Mankind has found again and again that to be precise in any field involving relationships is equivalent to using math in that field? Readers may or may not have noticed that my approach to mathematics often makes use of “nothings” to produce a great deal, and the discussion could have been framed in that perspective. I mention this here just to emphasize again the importance of “nothings” to our whole discussion.

A New Approach To Nonnative Languages It might be argued that in a world economy (as we now have or are close to having) it would be best if everyone spoke the same language. I believe this proposal has merit, but here I shall take a different approach to the language challenge presented by the emerging world society. My approach is as follows: If we can enable young people between the age of 5 and 12 to be competent in the six official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish), the need for a single language will be satisfied — and surpassed. In the field of teaching nonnative languages, a number of preconceptions and a number of bright ideas shape the most widely used approaches. However, there has been very little study of how learning actually takes place.

147

The Generation of Wealth

The following preconceptions influence most of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s teaching of nonnative languages; 1

Languages are made of words, ordered and governed by grammatical rules.

2 To learn the meaning of words in a new language, a student relates them to the equivalent in his or her language â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that is to say, the student uses translation. 3 To retain a language, a student must use drill and repetition and additional exercises that generally involve translation in both directions. 4 Language learning is difficult unless one is young and lives in a country where the language is spoken. 5 When one learns a language in a classroom with a teacher who is not necessarily a native user of the language, the learning process will be difficult, and one likely ends up with relatively little knowledge of the language and rarely feels either competent or confident in using it. 6 If people know the grammar of a language, they can decide for themselves if their statements are correct and thus have the skills to speak the words or write them down. In teaching nonnative languages, the following bright ideas have gained currency for a time during the last hundred years. 1

The direct method: In this approach, teachers introduce the words that, in their view, adequately 148

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

describe a picture that is being shown, and they then drill students until the class, uttering sounds in a chorus, seem to have gotten the words. After a while the oral work is followed by reading and writing (often in â&#x20AC;&#x153;latinizedâ&#x20AC;? script). The direct method, which has had a long career, is used by the Berlitz Schools and in many places. 2 The language, lab: This approach uses magnetic tapes and couples oral and written materials with the techniques of listening and hearing. The presumption of this approach is that a transfer to the uttering system will occur. But this in fact rarely takes place, and the language lab, after a few years of being in vogue, has now been almost totally abandoned. 3 The audio-visual method: This approach uses films (and, more recently, video tapes) to provide visual scenes. The scenes supply the meaning, and the sounds are meant to be imitated. Although this approach is popular, either because of the sources putting it on the market (institutions like the BBC for English and Crefel for French) or because it makes sense a priori, the audio-visual method has not proved as effective for language learning as its originators hoped. A number of hybrid approaches of teaching nonnative languages have appeared from time to time, received some attention as they are pushed vigorously and advertised at conventions, but so far none of them has obtained widespread recognition as being truly effective. One approach forbids beginners to say anything and instructs them instead to listen to a teacher who presents what he or she thinks appropriate, confident of being

149

The Generation of Wealth

understood by everybody and sure that once the sounds of the new language are heard, they will descend into the throats of the listeners and be uttered properly. Another seeks to eliminate fear in learners, contending that relaxation is the essential ingredient of language learning; it then uses many techniques to pass the actual language from the knower to the learner. Yet another approach, concerned with increasing the amount of vocabulary that a learner retains, proposes that students be placed in a specially created environment that uses music to allay their fears and enhance their receptivity; under such conditions, say the proponents of this approach, the improvement in memory is phenomenal. In contrast to all these methods and also to the common preconceptions regarding the learning of another language (all based on an a priori view of how the learning of a language actually takes place), the approach I have developed proceeds from the fact that almost all babies in the world learn their mother tongue effortlessly, very early in life. Whatever the language, however complicated it seems to grammarians and adult students, whatever its distinctive characteristics — whether it is articulated through particles or through prefixes and suffixes, whether it is verbdominated or stresses some other modes of thought, whether it is tonal or inflected — young children nonetheless learn it to the level required by their own needs of expression and the ability of others to understand what they say. It follows, then, if one can discover the criteria young learners use to learn their native language, it may be possible to transfer these criteria to the learning of a new language. It also follows that the original criteria are, in my terminology, “nothings”: whatever they may be, they lead, with only the smallest expenditure of energy, to the learning of the large and complex system that is a language.

150

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

Thus, I take the position that the economics of language learning can be studied on the billions of people acquiring their respective native languages, and the economics of teaching will depend on how well one can develop techniques and materials to take full advantage of how children accomplish the learning of language. I call my method of teaching non-native languages “The Silent Way” and have worked out the details for “transferring” approximately 30 languages — that is, for dealing with them according to the criteria humans everywhere use to learn their native tongues. This approach gives each component necessary to learn a language its rightful place. The components include widening the range of one’s utterance apparatus to produce a fluent and adequate flow of words in the new language, attaching strings of words of the new language to perceived meanings when they are transformed by the learner according to the components of different situations, and recognizing all the consistencies in the modifications required by changes in situations. This last criterion encompasses the deduction of verb conjugations (moods, tenses, persons, and numbers) and the generation of a functional vocabulary, which is very restricted for most languages (not more than 3 to 4 hundred words). All this is done so efficiently, because it makes use of what the learner already has accomplished, that learning a new language can be mastered in no more than 50 to 70 hours. To expand one’s vocabulary beyond the functional vocabulary essentially requires no more than the payment of a certain number of ogdens — in other words, it requires some memorization work. As the expanded vocabulary blends with the functional vocabulary, students are transformed into fluent speakers of

151

The Generation of Wealth

nonnative languages, who may at the same time learn to read and write these languages. In teaching with “the Silent Way,” I and others have found that it is entirely reasonable to recommend that one or two languages be taught to all school children every year. It is conceivable that students could know from 10 to 20 languages by the end of their secondary school. Expertise in learning languages increases every time we add a new language, and there is no more danger of saturation and loss of efficiency than there is when we learn more songs, or more pieces of music, or more steps in dancing. We must never lose sight of the remarkable fact that very young children learn the most foreign of all languages, their mother tongue, effortlessly and for good with only themselves as their teacher. “The Silent Way” is the method of transferring such competence to the acquisition of other foreign languages, a stepby-step way of working guided by the enormous linguistic powers of our students who already have proved themselves to be excellent learners. It is the perspective of Homo Economicus that leads us to find a way to use these powers to reduce the time students need to achieve a certain level of mastery in learning to speak, read, and write more and more languages. *** In concluding this brief overview of new solutions to three longstanding educational problems, I would emphasize two points. First, they show how much can be gained, how

152

5 Always Getting More From Less: The Economics Of Education

differently problems look when the consciousness of Homo Economicus is added to those of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber. Second, the solutions can properly be described as modern because they are centered on “nothings,” as are all hightech machines, and because they run smoothly and swiftly like the mind. More generally, the awarenesses of Homo Economicus and of “nothings” are new tools that can help us solve long-standing, complex problems in perhaps wholly unexpected ways.

153

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

Today, education has become an essential component of economic progress. In the world economy that is emerging, education is a necessity. In this chapter, we will use the light cast by our new understanding of Homo Economicus to explore some facets and challenges of the emerging world economy and the tremendous role that education plays in it.

Education And Economic Progress All parents see a need for education. Parents in the lower economic classes (in both capitalist and socialist societies) know that a â&#x20AC;&#x153;betterâ&#x20AC;? education can help their children overcome social barriers and reach a higher social status than the one they occupy. They know this from their own lives, having experienced obstacles when competing for jobs and even when trying to gain

155

The Generation of Wealth

training for jobs. But they also see around them that industrious, knowledgeable youths are more easily accepted by schools of greater reputation and by job interviewers for corporations. Many knowledgeable people are additionally aware that paper qualifications — long and detailed resumes — are by themselves no guarantee of success. They see that other human qualities are often required to do well in any of the thousands of specialized jobs in a modern advanced economy, and that training on the job is a widely accepted adjunct to general education, even to higher education. These observers recognize that education, in contrast to formal schooling, accompanies everyone who wants to get ahead in a career — which is to say, almost everyone. The content of such an education varies with the times. In periods of transition, like our own, people often cannot stop their working life and must, in effect, retool while running. Today, the entire personnel of corporations from top to bottom are being reeducated to use efficiently the “nothings” of electronic equipment (which are now part of factories and offices) and the new means of communication that are invading the economy, demanding new reflexes from its participants. As such changes bring about greater integration within and among institutions, people must gain a wider view of their jobs if they hope to keep them. Education thus has found its place enhanced in a modern economy. Education has become part and parcel of the fabric of the economy’s complex dynamic fresco, whose demands change

156

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

with the lighting and the angle of the onlooker’s instruments. Economic progress is no longer possible without taking into account the many different tasks facing education in special and specialized contexts. The importance of this point, the promise it holds, is indicated by the simple formulation, “The better we are as educators, the more likely we will bring out meaningful economic progress.” The picture is made brighter by the fact that the young have less to discard than their elders in becoming integrated into the new ways of working; the young do not have to discard old ways, they simply have to learn the new ones. Comparably, countries now entering the world economy may have a better chance of doing well than economically advanced countries, because the “younger” countries have less to dismantle or to replace. As with Olympic competitors entering an event, the winner today can be from anywhere. The only requirement for success is performance on a single event: “Let the best person win and be acknowledged as such.” It is with this hopeful perspective, emphasizing the powerful new place of education and the rough equality of all countries today, whether or not they are economically advanced, that we can examine important challenges and components of the emerging world economy, and investigate the realistic possibilities for generating wealth in economies at different stages of advancement.

157

The Generation of Wealth

The Danger Of A Growing Surplus Of Workers Putting to one side the impact of technology, the world population in and of itself is increasing so rapidly that there will be enough people to do all the physical jobs that have been done for centuries if not for millennia. Technology of course deepens the problem. Our mechanized world no longer has the need for great expenditures of physical energy. Machines increasingly do what people once did, and the introduction of more and more technological “nothings” means the disappearance of more and more jobs that once were the task of people. Given the current birthrates there will be an unabsorbable, constantly increasing surplus of working power. This is one of the great challenges of the emerging world economy. Even in the service industries, where mechanization will not be able to replace as many jobs as in the smokestack industries, the workers will still exceed the jobs, and the surplus will increase every year. The task we face is made more difficult by the growing population of older citizens, the beneficiaries of progress in hygiene and medicine. We maintain a regular turnover in our work force by retiring people at a relatively early age and giving their jobs to young people. But this leaves a growing body of older people without jobs, and this group represents an increasing burden to taxpayers or the government — with the proviso that the old spend their income from pensions and to this extent constitute a stable part of the economy. Another element adding to the surplus of workers is the broader range of people in the work force. Women have almost doubled

158

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

the size of the work force, thereby increasing the difficulties of everyone in it to secure jobs. Soon the prohibition against children entering the work force is likely to be eroded, for the new technology is (or soon will be) as accessible to children as to adults. Why hire one over the other then? All that keeps young people out of the high-tech workplace is little more than prejudice, and this eventually will disappear, with the result that the work force will again be enlarged. The question we must face sooner or later is: “What are all these potential workers to do?” How to think about this problem and perhaps frame a solution, is what we shall explore here.

The Family And Economic Change Can we help ourselves by looking to the structure of the family? Is there a reasonable way to reorganize the family so as to make it responsive to the new challenges we can identify today? Observations on the family suggest not. The history of the family in many kinds of societies indicates that it is a useful unit for maintaining a few people, provided of course that the breadwinners earn enough and share the benefits of these earnings with those they support. (For the most part, workers have been paid according to an equation that regarded only them as part of the employers’ responsibility. A worker’s income did not increase because, say, his family had another child or an in-law to support. Earners themselves allocated their income according to an equation in which they took responsibility for the various members of their families.)

159

The Generation of Wealth

It seemed for a while that smaller, more manageable social units were the answer to the challenges raised by growing elements of societies. Throughout history, societies have become larger and larger, to the point today that units of several hundred million people are common. Two contrasting trends have developed to handle this increase: to magnify and transpose to the society at large what had been found useful in the small units, or to superimpose on the old small units large superstructures such as collectivization or uniform state planning. The first trend has led to Western-style democracies, and the second to Soviet-type economies. But in both, families continue to linger as the way to care for people on an individualized basis. In capitalist countries, new mosaics of institutions and organizations have grown by day-today adjustments to new demands. Governments likewise have responded to new challenges by trial and error (often more error than trial, usually because political forces create only what special interests manage to obtain from legislators). In socialist countries, new challenges are met by long-term planning by theoreticians versed in abstract manipulations of abstract notions, and flexible experimentation is almost banned in principle. Yet the family lingers on, unintegrated in the effort to meet new challenges. This suggests that the family has its purpose, that no other institutional arrangement can meet this purpose equally well, and that the family cannot be reconceived to fulfill other purposes as well.

160

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

Challenges, Experiments, And Education As we face a challenge like the growing surplus of workers, we must ask ourselves: “How are such challenges met? How are solutions devised to resolve them?” In dealing with the vast challenges before us, those in power, in all societies, so far have done no more than “muddle through,” though this is hardly satisfactory. Rival political groups are doctrinaire and intolerant of each other, and among the groups whose beliefs are sustained by faith one is no more believable than another. Fixed ideas, whether religious or political or social, cannot solve new problems. The only approach open to humans (at least in the fields in which Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber work effectively) is to experiment. Experiments yield know-hows as well as errors and both are needed to learn what should be tried again and what should be avoided. Experiments are the only legitimate way of learning how to meet an unknown — something, that is, that cannot be reduced to the known. There is a good deal to say about the criteria that should guide the development of experiments — the most useful experiments are likely to arise from the interplay of a collectivity’s political, social, and economic conditions; all experiments should have built into them a component of learning from error — but here let us concentrate on the essential point that new challenges are new problems and cannot be reduced to what we already know.

161

The Generation of Wealth

Once this is accepted, we can look at Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus to maximize the learning from experiments and to reduce the errors and minimize their deleterious consequences. Each of these attributes of Man has different characteristics and functions in different ways. Homo Sapiens learns by reflection, Homo Faber learns by creating the next experiment after taking into account the conclusions of Homo Sapiens, and Homo Economicus intervenes to stop an experiment or to give the green light for its continuation, expansion, or extension. Both Homo Sapiens and Homo Economicus can work at desks; Homo Faber works in the phenomena of life â&#x20AC;&#x201D; on objects or linkages between them, or on the energies poured into the objects or linkages, or on bringing an experiment to its conclusion. Homo Sapiens and Homo Economicus should be blended together from the start of an experiment. When this is done properly, the two components reinforce each other; whether one component is better than the other does not matter; together they are superior. Unlike Homo Faber, who clearly consumes time in making things, Homo Economicus and Homo Sapiens do their work using time but in an unrecorded manner: a bright idea can come at once and illumine a mind immediately. Homo Sapiens may need time to examine the logic in a proposal presented by Homo Economicus, and conversely. But both are vigilant before entering an experiment and both require the guidelines of mental criteria (rather than, say, physical performance) to do their work. After an experiment, Homo Sapiens examines the work of Homo Economicus which in turn sanctions the findings of Homo Sapiens, and together they tell

162

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

Homo Faber whether to go ahead or to begin another experiment. Thus, learning has a functional place in the process of developing a possible solution to the point that it benefits a collectivity, and precisely because learning is so critical to the resolution of the complex modern problems we face, education is critical. This discussion may appear to be a digression, but as we shall see, it is fundamental to the practical implications of this book. The argument that I will develop more fully in a later chapter I can briefly assert here. If the Homo Sapiens and the Homo Faber in each member of a community is educated, and if Homo Economicus has been used to make that education as economical as possible, the result will produce the best possible support for the economic development of any community.

Robots And Automation — Achievements Of Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, And Homo Economicus Let us return more directly to the issue of a growing surplus of workers and to two achievements of Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus, working together, that have contributed to this situation — robots and automation. The interplay of the attributes of Man is illuminated in the case of robots and automation. Homo Sapiens and Homo Economicus cultivate the uses of “nothings,” but Homo Faber is bound by the demands of what it must make and by the circumstances at hand. Today, when Homo Faber builds a robot, it provides itself with an alter ego that has built-in “nothings” representing the

163

The Generation of Wealth

components of Man concerned with effectiveness (Homo Economicus) and knowing (Homo Sapiens), so that the robot can do (Homo Faber) whatever it has been built to do. The robot, thus, is a true object of the trinity at work. It is becoming increasingly clear that high-tech societies have moved towards a phase of economic development in which continued success depends on maximizing efficiency while, first, minimizing expenditures of time, money, effort (the educational proposals in the last chapter are an example) and, second, applying the right amounts of energy. In high-tech societies, we have extended the universe of physics — which centers on the consumption of energy — blending it with the “nothings” of our mental universes, to create a new universe of economics in which we are always present and command energy to be efficient in all that it does. The robot is an example. The robot does things, guided by the new “nothings” we have invented. These “nothings,” which constantly supervise the functionings of energy, stand for our vigilant eye. Through “nothings,” the human presence is in acknowledged control of the robot’s dynamics. Now, the robot, although it reduces the need for certain kinds of work, is not a threat. It is rather an image of Man the creator, and a tool for human development. By introspection, Homo Sapiens has discovered in himself some of the workings of intelligence and found a way of transferring this understanding to and embodying it in machines. The name given to the intelligence carried by robots is Artificial Intelligence, or AI. Artificial Intelligence is a quantum jump ahead of logic, the mechanics of thinking, harnessed in the calculator and in part in

164

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

the computer. Artificial Intelligence uses logic, but it also uses every behavior that can be reduced to forms compatible with logic. Put another way, Artificial Intelligence uses logic as the base for analyzing and organizing behavior. All the work done with the computer during the last several decades has been in the realm of Artificial Intelligence, and the process of analyzing behavior by the criteria of logic will continue until the boundaries of the approach are reached. Work in factories and offices is now yielding to the analyses of Artificial Intelligence. The result is automation, a dominant element in the changes overtaking the workplace. Automation is an irreversible course, and all that can be automated will be automated. Some of the workplace changes produced by automation are indeed spectacular, but they are quickly accepted as if they were only routine-like additions to the manmade world we are constructing. In certain ways, we are not at all aware of the transformations taking place before our eyes. Leaving for the user-public only actions that require â&#x20AC;&#x153;nothingsâ&#x20AC;? (like pressing a button or just approaching it with a finger), the new high-tech machines of automation are as powerful as intelligence in their ability to replace a number of separate components with a synthesis that does every component at least as well and also does something none of the components could do alone. It is this integrated new component that constitutes the progress and the justification of the new machines, and imposes the acceptance of AI.

165

The Generation of Wealth

One consequence of embodying AI in modern machines is that the machines can be taken everywhere; they are not huge factory-like operations, but movable objects. In addition, they can be used by anybody disciplined enough to follow the instructions. Movability and general usability are critical characteristics of automation and AI. They mean that all the Third World countries can participate in the progress of the overall economy of the planet through the new equipment, and thereby considerably reduce the time it will take them to reach the level of the advanced countries. A second important feature of AI is that it collectively serves the Homo Economicus of the masses by not asking for their actual mental evolution to reach the level of the most advanced intelligence, but asks rather that they simply add to the skills that already exist in them — specifically, the level of the intellect that is found in many somatic functions and is sufficient to operate the machines. The ease of using the new machines is captured in the phrase “user friendly,” created by microcomputer sales people to invite everybody to acquire one of their machines. Robots and automation, upsetting the present for some, destroying many jobs permanently, are at the same time critical tools for mastering the future.

166

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

A Second Look At Education And Economic Progress It might appear that the majority of the inhabitants of the earth have little hope of ever gaining an improved standard of living. But the dynamics of the picture we are sketching give us reason to believe that the bleak situation of the present may eventually be amenable to control and change â&#x20AC;&#x201D; so long as we do not retreat too soon in despair from the litany of disasters before us, including a nuclear winter, poverty and famine, soil erosion, pollution, budget deficits, bankruptcies and foreclosures, unemployment, and crime. Over the course of history, no one so far has been powerful enough to turn the course of events to the advantage of the people, and misery has been rampant. Today is no exception. We must not confuse a vision of improving the lot of humans with its immediate availability. We shall have to continue to bear our own misfortunes. For an uncertain period of time, any number of conditions may be as bad as they ever were. Our situation is exacerbated psychologically by the fact that we are regularly appraised of events everywhere, particularly the miseries of large numbers of people, and it is easy to become depressed over the news and impatient because remedies are not instantly forthcoming. Nonetheless, if we simultaneously are in touch with what cannot change now and what might change or actually is changing, we shall feel more realistic, and we shall be able to move towards eradicating the impediments that stand in the way of the plentiful, positive use of ourselves for

167

The Generation of Wealth

everybody’s good — a state of being which will arrive when it can. What we can do now, with the realistic hope that its effects will transform social conditions, is to create the type of education examined in the previous chapter. Such an economical education not only will enhance our abilities to cope with the intellectual demands of many contemporary situations, it will make us freer and more responsible. It will make us freer because we shall have experienced independence in learning and perceived our autonomy by discovering the deep initiative of which we are capable (so long as educators provide for us the small core of information we cannot invent). It will also make us more responsible. We will become responsible to ourselves for taking the necessary steps required for our learning, and as a result we shall become responsible to the various groups we relate to, and from there to society at large. With the kind of education we examined in the preceding chapter and with the skills it will bring — skills we can trust and know how to use, because they are built on criteria we have formed ourselves — we can, like apprentices, receive the training that Homo Economicus can provide, and apply all our intelligence and all our sensibility to making our world a better place to live in. Just as we take advantage in advanced societies of all the physical progress in the environment, and do not have to remake such structures as roads, tunnels, bridges, airports, and subways, but can use them freely or at a small fee, so similarly we are allowed in Third World countries to reach for all that has been already invented, tested, and adopted so as to ease our way into the future of improved economic conditions. Having at our

168

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

disposal all the gains derived from the investments of intelligence, of experimentation, of correcting mistakes, of production, of finding economic answers (to list the most obvious), we need to invest only in adaptations, in training, in maintenance — a much smaller, much more affordable burden, particularly if loans are available for the initial phases of applying the lessons of education. The improved education we have outlined here, the freedom to dispense with the need to retrace the path of evolution, the availability of more responsible financing and management, these components together will make for a real difference. They provide the basis for a realistic hope that many more people will have a better future. If improvements in economic conditions carry over into other areas — as well they might, because people will find themselves with available time and energy and with better-educated minds — we can move from the paralysis engendered by the contemplation of such vast misery as exists today to a dynamic involvement in collective social evolution which in turn may be the preface to a wider human evolution of all of us on earth, together.

Overpopulation And Individual Awareness An education that builds on the capacities (wide-ranging and powerful) of learners helps them come to grips with problems in a human way — that is, without the use of institutional authority. Is there a human solution, one arising from within, to the problem of over-population, in contrast to the institutional, social solutions currently offered?

169

The Generation of Wealth

Today, there are objections from one group or another to every one of the solutions advanced to control population: to stop pregnancies before they occur via contraceptives or coitus interruptus or by sterilizing men or women or both; to stop pregnancies after they occur through abortion; or to let pregnancies reach termination and either leave unwanted babies and children to providence or accept the obligation of supporting physically weak individuals who will need assistance for a long time. All these alternatives leave the overall challenge of overpopulation untouched. So far, only isolated individuals have tried a true human solution to the challenge — true because it does not assume, as do the current proposals, that men and women are primarily male and female and because of their sexual drives are bound to mate with each other. Such a view presumes that men and women are largely controlled by their instincts, in other words, that they are part of the animal realm. But humans are an evolutionary step beyond animals,* and instincts are operative in humans only if humans yield to a preconception or prejudice and substitute knowledge of the animal kingdom for human reality. The instinct of preservation, the need for procreation, is invoked only if people see themselves as animals who have to survive and perpetuate their species. But human behavior shows us that Man is not bound by this instinct. Man can easily commit suicide and does so for all sorts of reasons. As Bergson *

From my studies on evolution (discussed in other publications), I have concluded that there are so far, four realms of evolution: the cosmic (atomic and molecular in which matter evolves), the vital (the realm of plants in which form evolves), the animal (in which instinct evolves), and the human (in which awareness evolves).

170

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

wrote, “Man is himself a species of one individual only.” Abstinent monks and nuns, and the many religious orders demanding celibacy to produce a higher quality of being, all contradict the theory that Man must mate simply because he is endowed with reproductive sexual organs. Man can choose not to mate, a fact that is proven every day and has been substantiated over long periods of time by the many who have abstained from mating. The abstinence of nuns and priests provides important lessons. Their abstinence is a product of their religious education, which succeeds with most of them. They do not let themselves entertain their sexual endowment in itself, and instead relate to their affective functions as humans and not as animals. In the language of my perspective, they know that a will dwells in them, and they use it to prevent themselves from falling into the animal realm. From the successful religious example of educating humans in the realm of sex, we can learn how to help other humans see that a will dwells in them too — a will that is a human power, which exists not only during periods of opposition and struggle, when it is manifestly apparent, but as a companion of every moment of one’s life. The will is involved in all spontaneous learning, and therefore is intimately known by all of us, even though we may not yet be aware of it. The control of population is nothing more — nor less — than a matter of education. When every male capable of fertilizing an impregnable female exercises his will not to do this, there will be

171

The Generation of Wealth

no fertilization of the female. This appears self-evident. But acting in this way depends on knowing that one has a will and that one can exercise it, and when this becomes clear, then human sexual relations will no longer be seen as a form of animal mating with a “natural” consequence, the formation of a human embryo. Human embryos can come into being as a result of two humans deciding to have a child. And only then. Control of population thus becomes a human endeavor to be treated humanly. Once the will is accorded its proper place in the domain expressing love, then humans can move from mating to lovemaking. Sex and all it implies will come within the sphere of human action, where awareness is present and at work. Just as we can use education to involve youngsters in art and music, in sports and games, mobilizing the will to do and to control, we can use education — an education for love — to involve youngsters in learning to take lovemaking to its highest functioning level rather than using it as a device for procuring a few seconds of pleasure that can carry with it 20 years of unpredictable consequences, some of which can be misery. Because of awareness, humans can subordinate mating to love and the creation of a conscious new entity called the couple, which transcends the individual. Of course, at this moment in history, educators think of “sex education” only in terms of providing academic information about biological facts, paralleling the academic approach to the task of improving economic conditions in the midst of a faminethreatened world. In both areas of experience, the opportunity exists for an education involving the attributes of Homo

172

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus, leading to increased awareness and to “will-ful” action that will ease life for all of us. The challenge of controlling population is a human concern, and it can be tackled in a way that enhances Man’s awareness of himself and of his place in nature. But the solution can also improve Man’s material living. Although material and human purposes sometimes look so different, precisely because we remain at the level of appearances, one education can serve both. From the outside, experiences appear so different that their solutions often seem to have nothing in common and the cost of one would seem to do nothing to offset the cost of another. Yet there is only one will, one intelligence, one sensitivity at work in every one of us as we focus on different fields, producing different awarenesses of ourselves and our involvements. By working with the integral attributes of ourselves, we can take something from an experience in one field and transfer it to another. This is an inner transfer, and movement within costs nothing. It represents another example of “nothings” that can have tremendous consequences. To propose the elaboration of an education for love may sound as if one needs a very different approach than the approaches elaborated in the areas of reading, mathematics, and language. But since all learning is part of human education, we can reasonably suspect that although different challenges require different techniques, the techniques required by human reality will not change. All human education requires presence, a presence of the self in subtle thoughts.

173

The Generation of Wealth

Now, we can achieve such a presence easily when educational challenges are handled as they were in the previous chapter. Stimulating a presence may seem much harder when we consider love and the “job” of being with a cherished person. It may ultimately be found that in this area humans will become more “will-ful” when we bring to their awareness the perception that control of oneself in love-making is helped considerably when the loved one is included in one’s view. This perception, giving to the other person his or her rightful place, will bring more energy on which to hang one’s thoughts. The people engaged in a true education for love will feel that their integrity is being respected and not just the isolated part of them that will have failed if something happens. The education will be one of self-development rather than one of selfdiscipline or self-denial. It will not focus on inhibiting activities, an approach that can lead to anxiety. Control of population will look as a spiritual challenge rather than a biological a social, or an economic task. To be engaged in it will enhance one’s contact with onself and with another person. To people who are married and in love and not sentimentally attached to producing a child every time they make love, this human solution to the problem of overpopulation might be more acceptable than the current view of sexual relations. Soon, perhaps, the human realm of lovemaking will be much more important to people than is the perspective that puts sexual intercourse in the realm of instinct, “designed by nature” for mating and reproduction.

174

6 Education, Homo Economicus And The Emerging World Economy

The Solubility Of Italian Challenges Treating the control of population as a human challenge — a challenge whose resolution depends on the spirit and the will — and not as an economic challenge involving political authorities and institutional forms of implementation, can serve as a model for the treatment of other challenges that today appear intractable. They have this appearance because they are separated from the human context. Pollution, deforestation, waste disposal, and a long list of other problems are, above all, human challenges, whose resolution becomes far more possible when seen in the light of education than when seen as matters for laws and regulations. How easy it is to disregard legislated constraints, considering the small number of law enforcement officers as compared to the large number of people who can engage in a destructive activity. But when peoples’ awareness is touched, they cannot behave as if they did not know. The education of one person’s awareness — for example, to grasp the understanding that one’s own actions when multiplied by a large number can produce an excessive and unacceptable situation — can prevent the person from indulging in the action. Multiplying this effect by a large number may be the best response to a collective problem like pollution. It becomes everybody’s responsbility, and the cooperation of all provides a solution, at almost no cost. As soon as education becomes self-education, it also becomes a financially manageable activity. The effects of self-education continue to gain in importance and practical significance because the technique of transference involves more of each

175

The Generation of Wealth

person in social and collective living. Looking after oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s front porch is a small example. By encouraging the deliberate use of funds for activities that yield self-education, Homo Economicus contributes to the savvy of Homo Sapiens in governing individuals rather than masses. These observations show that the awareness that each person contains a Homo Economicus can aid Homo Sapiens in the development of a new field of how to replace social policing by a self-policing that is self-development, a much more effective solution for the simple reason that it is the maximally effective solution.

176

7 Homo Economicus And Bureaucracy

Let us examine the light that Homo Economicus can throw on the challenge of bureaucracies. Bureaucracies pervade contemporary life. Everyone recognizes that however important their substantive aims, bureaucracies eat up our time, demand that we wait and adjust our schedules, and often lead to long delays. Bureaucracies, designed to serve social purposes, have become a rigid, wasteful ruler of the time belonging to each of us. Is there any way this can be changed? Can we find solutions that will keep in our hands the time we now are robbed of by bureaucracies?

Bureaucracies And The Social Absolute Bureaucracies are a development of the social absolute that came to a dominant position in the Western world, starting in the second half of the 18th century, when it joined the intellectual absolute that had been guiding Western civilization

177

The Generation of Wealth

since the Renaissance. The intellectual absolute said that all things of importance were to be revealed through the intellect. The social absolute said society was man-made and that a world of value and goodness was to be created by reforming the social world. The intellectual origins of the social absolute can be traced back to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s essay, “The Social Contract,” which suggested that there existed a human nature whose goodness had been diminished by institutions. Corrupting human nature, institutions had proposed a “civilized” man — selfish, exploitative, evil, a creature the world would be better without. A return to nature would provide a chance to start afresh. In every individual, Rousseau wrote, there was a man and a citizen, each with different functions. Man was concerned with life, its secrets and beauties, and was capable of reaching inner riches (which the Romantics explored and made more commonplace over the next hundred years). The citizen was mainly concerned with the common good and how to achieve it. Rousseau, opposing Plato’s vision of a state ruled by a philosopher king, proposed a citizenry nourished by the inherent good of nature’s creature, called Man. This vision of Man’s world had a tremendous impact. Appealing as it did to almost every thinker, who found in himself the good man and the concerned citizen, it inspired the American and the French Revolutions and the Constitutions they produced. It even touched the British, who during this period tended to turn into themselves, finding there the wealth of emotions, feelings, and sentiments explored in the literature of the time. So great was the impact of Rousseau’s work that the passion attached to

178

7 Homo Economicus And Bureaucracy

the intellectual absolute was shifted to a new absolute, the social one, still at work in the West. The new absolute has been concerned with social life outside the control of the State. It has explored the possibilities of Man in society, exploiting the possibilities that follow the awareness that societies are made not given. Moreover, society could be made to do what had never been done before. The State, in society, could be forced to serve the individual rather than the other way around, which heretofore had always been the case. Experimenting with the social absolute was as exciting and varied as experimenting with the intellectual absolute had been. While the social sciences were being created by the intellect to meet the needs of the new absolute — to take stock of what was being created by Man, the social being — a much more important development was the new institutions now springing out as they had never done before, to cope with all aspects of human living at the social level. Everyone will have a copious list of such institutions, from public libraries, public schools, trade unions, hospitals, universities, learned societies, all sorts of clubs, fraternities, sororities, and chambers of commerce, to building groups, vigilante groups, friends of this and friends of that — with new organizations and institutions still emerging every day for any cause that strikes one as needing the support of others. All this shows that Man, having reached the awareness of the reality of human relations and having integrated into this

179

The Generation of Wealth

absolute the heritage of centuries of work in other absolutes, can no longer see himself as having been created alone, as Adam presumably was. Rather he now sees himself as almost entirely the product of his social environment. One result of this perspective is that an individual barely exists in the social absolute. People are mainly cogs in a machine. The most extreme variation of this view is the Marxist-Leninist conception that the automatic unfolding of history somehow produces individuals who act, think, and guide as leaders but who do so only in so far as they are products of the historical process and that these leaders offer what is necessary for the collective State to pursue the unfolding regulated by historical materialism. No wonder, then, given the place of the individual within the social absolute, that the most conspicuous organization of people in society today is the bureaucracy each State has created to carry out its business.

Bureaucracy, Automation, And Human Solutions In evaluating the behavior of bureaucrats, everyone sees that inertia is one of their attributes. Everyone also regrets that this is so, but no one believes anything can be done about it. Some even say that inertia may be the appropriate response in certain circumstances, except that unfortunately one usually must accommodate to inertia in all circumstances. But we now can

180

7 Homo Economicus And Bureaucracy

see there are other ways to meet the challenges addressed by bureaucracies. A special way of working in the social absolute leads to the generation of more and more bureaucracies. Bureaucracies function at the social level as concepts and ideas function at the intellectual level: they are meant to organize reality. Bureaucrats are in appearance people, but as bureaucrats, their behavior is prescribed and stereotypical. Bureaucrats are asked to adhere to the preplanned and to make it seem vital. They cannot be individuals, which is to say people using their will to do what they want. As bureaucrats, they can do only what they have been appointed to do. It is the nature of their job that they best meet the needs of their work when they no longer are themselves and when they identify fully with their official function in their agency. Bureaucrats say that they “administer.” The substance of what they administer is immaterial to them (except of course when they are at their tasks, which are varied and complex). Of course, there are many levels of bureaucrats, and not all bureaucrats follow the same stereotype, but all have one attribute in common: they come into existence after a project has been worked out to the stage of implementation, when it needs the kind of energy best dispensed by people. Increasingly, however, people are no longer needed to do the work of bureaucracies. Artificial Intelligence is entirely capable of performing bureaucratic work, and the process of shifting this work to electronic machines has begun. Bureaucracies are being replaced by complex electronic systems organized as a series of

181

The Generation of Wealth

chronological programs, each dealing with a given process. After one process is concluded another begins, and the programs are “built” one atop another in a temporal hierarchy. The system is an analog of the bureaucratic process in which a file goes from one bureaucrat to another, each performing an operation that leads to the next predetermined operation. When it becomes obvious that machines can do the job of people, machines replace the people. The machine-screening of airplane passengers and their luggage is an example. On the other hand, until checking dutiable goods becomes as easy as scanning for metal weapons with X rays, people will continue to examine the contents of suitcases. Reform in reconceptualizing non-mechanical tasks is slow to come because bureaucrats are involved, and it is not their job to alter the rules imposed on them. But human rather than bureaucratic solutions are possible, and reforms come when a non-bureaucrat is invited to look at a bureaucratic situation in a larger context. For example, it took a non-bureaucrat to see that the huge number of passengers reaching customs everywhere would require armies of officers to inspect their luggage and that the operation would cost much more than the revenue lost by allowing cheating passengers to go through the gates marked “nothing to declare.” There are more and more examples of non-bureaucratic solutions every day, as non-bureaucrats discover the disadvantages of that remarkable adjunct to social action which was a natural extension of the effort to involve more people in

182

7 Homo Economicus And Bureaucracy

social decisions. In fact, the critique of bureaucracy is a renewal of the awareness expressed by Karl Marx when he saw that the jobs of factory workers were soulless and he invited them to change the organization of labor. Today, soulless jobs are more conspicuous among bureaucrats than among factory workers. Indeed, what can be identified as human in the many bureaucratic activities that can be mechanized? Today we see that all of the functions of bureaucrats should be given to machines, which is why the automation of offices is now almost neck and neck with the automation of factories.

The Human Value Of Automation Is it not a sign of the increased awareness of Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s humanity that all jobs which do not respect such human characteristics as intelligence, initiative, and will, are being handed over to machines? Social organization entails the compilation of larger and larger files containing more and more items of information. This information cannot be considered knowledge, which is produced by the sciences; instead it represents transient elements needed for a specific purpose which itself is transient. To compile, control, and recall these files involves activities that consume human time (though not much energy). No one could call this activity a source of experience, so the time it consumes is irretrievably lost by the people who give it out of the allotted amount of their lives. Such occupations are indeed a sale of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time for nothing that one values, except the financial payment one receives for it. This is the reason that most

183

The Generation of Wealth

bureaucrats, wherever they are, see their jobs as increasing their alienation and the fragmentation of their integrity — the situation of industrial workers, as Marx saw it, 140 years ago. We must therefore welcome the increasing automation of our offices, for the process is attempting to reserve to humans the activities that only humans can do today — even as it claims more and more jobs for the mill of automation and, for the moment at least, increases unemployment. (Yet deep down we may recognize that as unemployment becomes a pressing problem, it cannot be left unattended and will spur collective solutions, while the alienation of Man does not.) We must also welcome the development because during a certain period automation generates wealth for some and work for many. Some of this work, ironically, is bureaucratic — for example, supervising automatic production in factories. Thus, at the same time as earlier ways of working continue — and are celebrated as traditional by people who forget that these methods had also been introduced as new not so long ago — new ways of working are being introduced. Today, the new ways involve only a fraction of the working population. But the fraction is increasing every day, and every day people are adding to the economic scene more proposals utilizing the new changes. Collectively, this means that a dynamic is being superimposed on the pattern of ways that people use to exchange their working time for something else, and as the dynamic gains meaning and importance, it will reconstitute the social fabric. One day all the strong passions and conflicts that filled the “life moments” of the

184

7 Homo Economicus And Bureaucracy

three groups involved in this process — the traditionalists, those who already are part of the change, and those who are adding their views to advance their own outlooks and resist those of others — will vanish. The dynamic will win, and it will mold the man-made universe, leaving to social scientists the task of describing and explaining what took place, why and how.

The Death Of Bureaucracies All people ultimately want to affirm their existence as humans endowed with sensitivity, intelligence, and a sense of timeliness in their actions and involvements. Clearly, more wealth must be produced all the time to counter the opposite tendencies now apparent in the world: more people and more unemployment; fewer producers and more dependents (both old or young). But where can we see such an increase today? Not in the handouts to unproductive people; not in the amounts absorbed by taxes and then used to fund all the unproductive functions of the military, police organizations, the many bureaucrats who maintain the government machines, the many people engaged in the routine, bureaucratic-like tasks of watching doors, cleaning buildings, collecting garbage, extinguishing fires, and on and on — activities all deemed necessary but which visibly do not contribute to the generation of wealth (although they may contribute to its maintenance at a certain level). Wealth cannot come from these activities and organizations, which are either actual bureaucracies or bureaucratic-like in operation. Just as the most important source of energy on earth is the sun (in terms of the amount reaching the earth in a

185

The Generation of Wealth

narrow beam), so the most important source of the generation of wealth is people and their imagination. It is the activities of people and the scope of their imagination that will bring an end to bureaucracies. For bureaucracies deal with the past and the known, and the imagination deals with the future and the unknown. We can see an example of what imagination can accomplish in the technique of spending now to meet current needs and charging the bill to the next generation. Bureaucracies reenact what is finished, they deny the imagination, and thus they cripple the future, hampering its important value to the present. The invention of credit, a child of Man’s imagination, has brought the future to the rescue of the present. By giving to the present more possibilities than are warranted by current conditions alone, Man has found one way of generating now what would have been possible later but would not have been as useful then as it is now. The act of borrowing for activities that contribute to a true generation of wealth has been the mark of most successful adventures in business, to the point that borrowing in its variety of forms has become an almost independent entity in various economies. Credit makes the future the present. Through credit we mortgage the future and use it as a source of that which does not yet exist. It takes no more than a step to let the future serve as a guide for Homo Economicus in its ability to integrate Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber. Homo Economicus cannot know the specific entities of the future, but it can know what is being generated by wider and wider applications in which “nothings” interact. Homo Faber is entrusted with overseeing such

186

7 Homo Economicus And Bureaucracy

applications — the Homo Faber who handles “nothings” as the apex of millions of years of handling “things,” to embody schemas proposed by Homo Sapiens. Today, Homo Faber is supported by a Homo Sapiens open to the future and a Homo Economicus watching the future’s descent into the present. The economy is no longer a fully describable entity. The acts in it are not controlled by the laws of determinism, and they alter themselves under the impact of such “nothings” as thinking, projecting, and inventing. Events occur in the economy that presumably could never happen — like the collapse of “solid” institutions, the threat to all by a few, the exhaustion of “inexhaustible” sources of energy, the emergence of an abundance that goes beyond subsistence. It is because the economy can no longer be fully known that bureaucratic solutions are a thing of the past. They have lingered for as long as the appearance of our old, incomplete, and often false, models of economic activity have dominated — models that confuse human work and machine work (which is not yet fully automatic). These appearances are of course the “reality” of the moment. But they are correctly seen as appearances when we view them from the perspective of the future. From this perspective, we can see that machines are true human objectifications, and their use reveals the transformation of Man’s awareness of himself. Integrating machines in human life is a sign of Man’s evolution, a recognition that he is in part automatic and in part creative. Economies will reflect this awareness, bureaucracies will be seen as inadequate experiments of the past, and whole new options for generating wealth will appear.

187

The Generation of Wealth

“Nothings” have shown themselves to be capable of running Man’s world, and the universe of objectivations — the concrete manifestations of Man’s understandings and awarenesses — now is synthesizing “nothings” into machines that are as much hardware as software. The disappearance of the distinction between hardware and software is a fact of everyday life for more and more people and might one day soon be perceptible by all. Thoughts will then be seen as objectivations and objectivations as thoughts. Once Man is liberated from the old economic schemas (whatever their historical recency), which he did not take as conceptions but as hard reality, he can move boldly towards a new universe on which he has had only a beachhead. In this emerging universe, free of old rigidities, wealth may still keep its economic form, but this will be only one of its aspects, only one minor component bequeathed by the past.

188

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

In the past three chapters, we have looked at different contemporary situations and in each case asked the question of Homo Economicus: “Can this be done better?” In each case we found that by examining the problem directly and by applying various understandings of Homo Economicus, Homo Faber, and Homo Sapiens, we were able to answer “Yes” and to outline new solutions. Our concern in this chapter is to look at a problem of such vast proportions that most people consider it intractable. They devote their energies to resolving as best they can the most urgent aspects of the problem, and they hope that by steadily applying themselves, somehow a solution will emerge. I am referring to the economic poverty of the Third World countries. Is it possible to devise a plan that will lead to the eradication of this poverty in a matter of one or two generations? This is the challenge we consider in the following pages.

189

The Generation of Wealth

Some Common Prejudices About Economic Evolution To prepare the way for what follows, we need to dispel some current beliefs and assumptions â&#x20AC;&#x201D; they are prejudices, really â&#x20AC;&#x201D; about economic evolution. We will consider four of them. Prejudice #1 : Successful Change Always Demands A Slow Evolution Of Systems We know that this is false as a general principle from the way we provide ourselves with and utilize energy in our somatic systems. We take in food/energy in concentrated bursts, then distribute the energy between intakes. Rather than go on eating all the time, as some animal species do, we entrust our soma with the economics of energy, and we thereby free ourselves for other tasks. Concentrated feeding abruptly increases the level of the available energy; the slow, steady use of that energy characterizes the succeeding phase of use. So we all know from the moment of our birth that swift intakes are compatible with slow expenditures. With this in mind, it would only be a prejudice to believe that successful change demands a slow evolution of systems. The formula for success is to institute swift changes and provide periods of adjustment between the changes. Working on both phases in our own systems enables us to make sense of how and when to use the alternate approaches for evolutionary purposes.

190

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

Prejudice #2 : Change Demands The Consciousness Of The Waking State That important changes can occur outside of wakeful consciousness is clear from the way we process energy. Feeding involves the consciousness of wakefulness, but the delicate balancing of the chemical contents of the blood and the automatic adjustments in processing these contents can take place even in sleep and is in fact related to the consciousness of sleep.* By concentrated feeding at meals, Man acknowledges the need for waking consciousness to apply the guidelines for a proper refueling and the need also to leave to the automatisms developed in utero and later those processes that free the waking consciousness for other tasks and functions. With this in mind, it would only be a prejudice to apply to the problems of Third World economies a single way of responding and to choose only the mode of the waking state. The formula for success is to use the sharp presence of the waking consciousness to oversee swift transformations and the diffused presence of sleep to integrate the old in the new.

The reality of our lives indicates that waking and sleeping are two phases of consciousness, each complementing the other. I have developed this argument in Educational Solutions’ Newsletter Volume XV Issue 3-4.

191

The Generation of Wealth

Prejudice #3 : The New Can Be Understood In The Framework Of The Old Our own embryonic development tells us that there are two moments in each development: one is concerned with making the new, and the other with creating space for the new in what exists already in such a way that the new is not deprived of its property of being new. This two-step process has been solved in a system as complex and delicate as our soma by allowing the new to integrate the old through the technique of subordinating the old. This is the model of our own evolution (and of plants and animals as well), and it must be respected. The old cannot accommodate the new. All this perhaps sounds abstract and at best speculative. But consider the task of learning a new language. One would never learn a new language if the old language remained in one’s own waking consciousness, filling it. But one can learn a new language by commanding the old somatic structures to function as is required. And both linguistic systems can then command — though separately and differently — the same organs to produce one or the other. With this in mind, it would only be a prejudice to believe that the new should be reduced to the old. The formula for success is to suspend the automatic supremacy accorded the old and to let the new use the proper channels to realize itself. One of these channels is the will of the people who are working with the new. It is part of their tasks that they use their will to let the new integrate the old by subordinating it, and it is part of the task of

192

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

anyone seeking to induce change to help those undergoing change to accomplish this. Prejudice #4 : The Past Should Guide The Future The new succeeding the old constitutes a temporal hierarchy, and in this process the active self is always naturally at work on the latest layer of change while the energies left behind, in the earlier layer of change, maintains the functions of the old. Now, the past is not legitimated by itself but rather by the functions given to it and one function is to make the future possible. A past that arrogates to itself the right to make a future that resembles it, is usurping attributes it should not have. When this happens, time (which is change) and evolution no longer exist: the past in essence stops the future. In contrast, when the past takes its place as a background whose value ultimately will be determined by the dominant foreground of the future, then the past becomes what it actually is, the despository of that which has been tested and found valid and useful to permit life to continue. Giving the past its rightful place and no more is critical in helping to bring about change, for it allows the future to descend into the present and transform it. With this in mind, it is only a prejudice to prefer the past and to consider that its forms represent the whole of time and experience. The formula for success has always been that the young generations are attracted by the future and see no value in the past but only its capacity to stop the descent of the future. Until the young see the important role of the past in preventing the repetition of errors and see also the compatibility of the past with the future, the young press for an unstructured future and

193

The Generation of Wealth

ideal solutions to problems. Only after they recognize the temporal hierarchy that actually represents evolution, does the past regain its rightful valuable place and the present and future simultaneously assume their prominent roles.

Economic Lessons Of The Recent Past Since the end of World War II, many colonies that had been part of larger economies became newly independent countries responsible for their own development. The various efforts to stimulate the economies of these countries culminated in the stagnation of the late seventies and early eighties, and these efforts provide us with several valuable lessons. Most obviously they show us that the countries could not thrive either on the momentum of the revolutions that gave them their independence or by borrowing from rich countries or international institutions. But the widely recognized need for a new view of their situation did not materialize into an acceptable or a promising economic policy. Impasses have become the rule, particularly since the materially rich countries have been experiencing an economic pinch and have been uncertain of their own future. In the newly independent countries, caution prevailed in developing new policies to guide their own development. No one wanted to make a bad situation worse. With few new ideas to guide reforms, government after government abandoned their poorly conceived policies, and tried to rule by fiats and political decrees. But progress cannot be legislated.

194

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

Today it is clear that workable ideas have not been forthcoming in sufficient numbers. The difficulty in meeting the challenge lies in the inability of the people responsible for developing new solutions to be realistic and practical, characteristics that emerge only when the mind transcends traditional answers. In such a state of affairs, we shall continue to see for a while numerous efforts to “muddle through.” These efforts may make things worse or even intolerable. At the same time, increasingly desperate adventures may also lead to an upsurge of collective responsibility seeking to counter selfish and impossible attempts to save oneself or one’s country. Both kinds of responses can coexist — the selfish and the collective — because they will not be attempted by the same people. But as time goes by the desperate adventures will lose momentum, and their proponents will come to recognize the validity of a collective effort to put our only house, the earth, in order as a single unit. No solution can be found simply in sharing what we now have. We would need to be incomparably wealthier to resolve the economic challenge of the Third World by such a redistribution. Sharing can perhaps be a small part of the coming solution, but it essentially provides only a stop-gap measure, a transitional element. The International Monetary Fund recently attempted to resolve the failure of the old approaches by insisting that countries asking for financial loans establish strict austerity. For

195

The Generation of Wealth

developing countries, this policy often means a return to the modes and standards of living in periods prior to the recent past, when it became fashionable to live above one’s means. But governments of the developing countries accept the imposed rule in desperation, even as it becomes clear that austerity is no real solution to their economic ills. Putting a stop to profligate spending is reasonable, of course, but this policy is not equivalent to generating more wealth, and it is this which is needed — and no international bureaucrat is equipped to offer it. It is possible that borrowing from institutions or governments while living in conditions of austerity may provide a breathing space during which someone in a given country might propose a possible solution: “Let us first control a running inflation, and once this is achieved, consider how to generate wealth with what we have.” But what if it turns out that no one wants what they have? What have they done? Increased their external debt and reduced their standard of living, postponing their hope for material improvement for an unforeseeable future. The experiments of the last ten years have basically been palliatives. They were emergency measures taken by politicians who live only in the present moment and who adjust daily to new crises instead of examining, and forecasting accurately, what is needed in the long term. The primary lesson we learn from the experiments is to discontinue them. We do not learn the course to follow.

196

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

A Ten-Year Proposal For Creating Abundance After all or almost all the experiments of local salvation prove to be wanting, the moment will come when desperate governments and legislatures will look for a proposal that offers a reasonable possibility of meeting the present challenges in the not-toodistant future. Ten years may be an acceptable time period for postponing the satisfaction of one’s desires — and in this case, “one” means “everybody.” What I propose here is a ten-year plan for educating the citizenry so that they encounter in themselves their Homo Economicus and use it to develop and implement a collective solution for all. No doubt some readers already consider such a proposal as hairbrained or, at best, utopian. How can education — the teaching of mathematics, of reading, of science — lead to an adequate solution to the generation of wealth? In whole countries? In little more than a decade? We have been trying in this book to understand the significance of Homo Economicus, both in itself and in conjunction with Homo Faber and Homo Sapiens. The proposal I shall outline here carries forward threads in our investigation — in a sense I am applying what we already have learned. In any event, I ask the skeptical reader to postpone judgment and to consider the nature of the challenge and how the proposal outlined here seeks to meet it. This in brief is my plan. While governments continue to “muddle through,” which is inevitable under the circumstances, they all should put aside a certain amount to finance the successive phases of the educational effort to mature the Homo

197

The Generation of Wealth

Economicus of as many citizens as can be reached. This effort means two things: first, that in ten years of schooling, a transformed education is used to turn every child into a person who has lived the exchange of time into valuable experience; and second, that such an education — active, continuous, and on matters that count — is made available to very large numbers of people, who then, because of their education and their large numbers, would be able to transform society by the most sufficient and best use of the available human and natural resources. We have already sketched out the economics of education in Chapters 5 and 6. For dramatically less money than is spent for education today, the educational approach described in those chapters can furnish the immediate experience of what efficiency means, in the concrete, in detail, and over a stretch of time. I ask readers to consider the value that such a direct experience would have on transforming the global economy. The experience would become more profound and more pervasive every year as all school children seriously engage in always getting as much for their time as can be gotten in numerous human activities. This continuous direct experience of exchanging one’s time for something of value has been lived by only a small number of people. Today we can make it the climate of growing up, and by starting with first-graders replace today’s schools in ten years. Of course older students may also be open to the benefits of such an education even if not all of them can do away with the bad habits that the schools have fostered by the absurd use of the students’ time.

198

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

The notion of exchanging time for experience may seem esoteric, but it is concrete and practical. This, remember, is what all babies do all the time, as they master the challenges that life brings them. Thus, a continuity of learning from the very efficient learning found in all the spontaneous moments in babyhood will make many important characteristics a matter of second-nature: spontaneity in meeting challenges, the simultaneously daring and cautious ways of pinpointing the proper criteria for meeting a challenge, a discipline of total involvement with the challenge. An education that carefully varies the field of challenges, allowing the methods of approaching them to cover a spectrum of approaches in the dialogues of one’s mind with the world, will provide all an individual needs to meet the challenge of the social world. To repeat: all that we are doing is extending the lessons offered by every child everywhere when overcoming the obstacles encountered in spontaneous learning and benefiting from the experience. As the individual enjoys extending the essential techniques of learning, to the subjects that now only consume time in schools without offering the gain of experience, an expanded universe will be created in every person. For the people going through such an education, Homo Economicus, emerging from the fertilization of Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber by an emphasis on yields and “nothings,” will be available for reexamining local matters at hand and for devising a workable global economics. Prejudices will be exposed for what they are and reduced to the point of disappearance. Every new experiment will be foolproof because of the active participation of doer-critics and critic-doers. Passivity will be replaced by a sense of one’s importance in the

199

The Generation of Wealth

unfolding of collective life on earth. Individuals, each in a mutual relationship to society, will know not only what they receive from others but also what they contribute to the collective. Society will not be reduced to a non-human force, individuals will not be reduced to one of many. Instead, the mutual dynamic of inputs from individuals and impacts from society will form a real picture of the human reality of the day. When that picture is clear, then abundance will flow, unrestricted by the theories that stress the importance of society (the socialist ideal) or the individual (the capitalist ideal). Both together are the fabric, and between them the woven relationships allow changes in emphasis and in the isolation of different details, but such selections do not alter the totality that is reality.

The Wealth Of Inner Abundance I have written that abundance will flow when we see clearly the mutual dynamic between society and the individual. What do I mean? I start with inner abundance, the awareness of one’s fathomless power to be in touch with one’s self and with reality. Inner abundance is not stressed by those people, so far the large proportion of Mankind, who come to themselves from “outside.” Yet inner abundance seems always to be at hand, for it works on “nothings,” while outer abundance is finite and impermanent. Once inner abundance is given its cardinal place, it lights up the possibilities of extending it and making it a source of outer

200

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

abundance. An economy in which outer abundance flows from inner abundance is an economy that provides for all. Such an economy must find its origins in eradicating the many forms of waste that we know today. Education currently provides a prime example of deplorable waste. The effort to end the wastes we all experience will bring to everyone an awareness that to live is indeed to exchange time for experience and to select the most worthwhile experiences for the exchange. This effort may collectively bring us to the point where we can say: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Let us eradicate the conditions that still hamper collective evolution: the destitution of masses who are forced to put all their energies into survival, the inequities that prevent people from providing for themselves the facilities we enjoy in so many places (libraries, clothing, movies, museums), the inadequate use of individual talent in collective undertakings, the limitations that restrict opportunities when in fact so many channels for self-expression exist.â&#x20AC;? Until now, plans to generate wealth have been proposed by towering individuals or by institutions who force their plans upon unconsulted and often unconscious masses of people unaware of their own reality and their inner powers. Now that we know that the inner powers of Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus exist and come to the world with us, we can attempt, through education, to make everyone aware of their existence, their function in evolution and now in shaping

201

The Generation of Wealth

societies, so that societies will truly serve everyone by integrating more and more people in what is offered to all.

A Nonbureaucratic Model For Implementing The Education Of Awareness By offering the education of awareness as the present-day formula for generating wealth for everyone, we have taken a decisive step in bringing education to the necessary stage of concreteness for meeting this critical challenge. By offering several detailed examples that can be tested for their realism and relevance and for their compatibility with every historic system still displayed on our planet, we have indicated that education can transform our planet because it can give our inner abundance a central place in all societies. By stressing the transfer of awareness, the transfer of skills, the transfer of emphases, we have opened all human activities to the influence of a rich awareness working on “nothings,” and we have opened the outer-world to the impacts of the inner-world. We have reached a workable proposition, and to this extent are on the road to implementing it. The question now is: How can we systematically implement it without creating a new bureaucratic system? The transfer of awareness from one individual to many occurs through “contagion.” This contagion works best and for the longest duration when it takes the form of inspiration, which always requires that the person being inspired has an inner dynamic of aspiration. Aspiration makes inspiration perceptible. Without the dynamic of aspiration, no goal could

202

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

inspire. But inspiration must have its own existence, “descending” from the future to in-spire the individual who at the same time a-spires to receive the gifts of such realization. When aspiration and inspiration merge, the result is the most effective and often the most efficient mobilization of an individual’s inner powers. Today, inspiration is contained in the perception that the real habitat for humans is our whole planet and that the planet must function as a healthy soma does — or more accurately, as a healthy soma-psyche does (examples of which can be seen in a number of people), or more precisely yet, as a healthy somapsyche-self does (even though only a scattering of individuals can be said to have achieved such health over the centuries). The content of this perception is vague only to those who put their minds somewhere else. The numbers of people who see it in a future fast descending on us are increasing every day. This descent — this awareness of the whole planet as the habitat of all humans — can be accelerated to the precise length of one generation by working together in the collective interest of the globe. Instead of fighting against obsolete expressions of interests, as must be done in political arenas; instead of wasting time and energies in creating new institutions, stuffed at first with enthusiasts and later with bureaucrats, and thus rendered sterile; instead of following existing models for dissemination, as is done in all sorts of promotions for all sorts of causes and objectives, we can help spread the inspiring true awareness of the future by the process of contagion. Indeed, all true revolutionaries have followed that way of working — Socrates in the markets of Athens, Buddha speaking with those who came to

203

The Generation of Wealth

him, Jesus talking to the destitute — and their influence (and that of other revolutionaries) is felt today much more pervasively than the influence of men and women promoted by the media or award-granting institutions. Those who attend the revolutionaries become “agents of contagion,” in whom the content of the inspiration becomes the focus of truth and reality. Agents of contagion start their work on small specific environments and then spread out inconspicuously — in a manner, one can say, that resembles the impact of acid rain. With acid rain, the effects are unsuspected till it is almost too late for the environment to be brought back to its prior condition. The victims of acid rain are trees so old they seem to be a permanent part of the natural scene, but they yield to the tearing effects of molecules falling from above and against which the trees have no defense: they were not prepared for that. So with apparently imperishable institutions and the effects of contagion. Inconspicuous activities can generate great changes, which are sensed only when the changes reach a level of magnitude that forces people to do something about it — and quickly. Unlike acid rain’s damage to the environment, of course, the descent of the awareness that Man’s habitat is global will be enhancing and fruitful. Most importantly, it will help eliminate the obstacles to Man’s evolution, and both the present fragmentation of our world and the forms that perpetuate this fragmentation (tolerated through timidity, hypocrisy, or ignorance) will yield to more integrated forms which themselves must have the capacity to generate newer forms as they are needed. One can say now that if the new forms are institutions,

204

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

they cannot be static, as fixed as monuments. They must be testimony to Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s passage through the social absolute during which he learned to create adequate institutions for particular purposes but did not perceive that the purposes were transient. Now we must learn to create dynamic institutions which by definition become something else as time goes by and as experience takes the place of time. Awareness, promoted through contagion, is the nonbureaucratic technique that can lead to implementing a ten-year educational proposal to prepare the young to meet the challenges of our complex world.

The Tasks Of Governmental Leaders And Other Officials If governmental leaders in a given country do not see the urgency of changing the outlook of officials who prefer to perpetuate their tenure rather than allow the future to mold policies, we have to accept the fact that the institutions in such countries will share the fate of trees attacked by acid rain. But if a government sees the importance of cooperating with the descending future and of letting the new global civilization integrate local institutions by subordinating them more and more to the new, then the next ten years must be given over to dual tasks: first, of surviving in the prevailing conditions and muddling through, and second, of letting the inner powers of individuals come to the rescue of the situation. The second task means that the national budget will have to include the necessary funds to transform a nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s schooling from a rigid

205

The Generation of Wealth

and mostly obsolete institution into an institution capable of taking its future citizens to the levels of competence required by a modern economy — in other words, to accelerate considerably the acquisition of the intellectual tools that helped Mankind reach its present levels of knowledge in the sciences. It perhaps goes without saying that the new education outlined here will not work like today’s education — the old education. Teachers, instead of passing their knowledge along to students, will be assisted in their new work by techniques and materials capable of making students reach their own inner powers and use them more competently every day. It will be the students who educate themselves through the range of useful and interesting exercises they find right for themselves. There is no difficulty in producing all the necessary materials for all the students of the world at a small fraction of the cost now utilized to support obsolete approaches. Thus, the material can be made available even to populations with very low budgets for education, and the effect will be to increase the yields of education considerably. Today we have means undreamed of twenty years ago, and the new science of education can guarantee that in ten years the educational landscape will be unrecognizable. It will be filled with the luxuriant growth of the young generation using its own powers of perception, thinking, and serving — the last element of which, it should be said, is still in need of considerably more educational work.

206

8 A Swift-New Beginning For The Earth

Change And The Science Of Education This chapter could have been made longer by spelling out how an education created for the global community can become a parallel system to existing educational institutions and then supplant them in the course of ten years. The point worth emphasizing here is that students will easily make the change from one system to another. They are not loyal to curricula and methods which are always imposed on them. Only teachers, administrators, and parents are loyal, and for reasons that they have not subjected to scrutiny. Many educational prejudices prevail, and they need to be discarded. In an empirical field like education, this can be done only when the results of alternative approaches are seen â&#x20AC;&#x201D; exemplified, for instance, in the acceptance of new agronomic or agricultural approaches in Third World countries. Today, there are not enough people equipped to teach an education for the future who could be induced to do so by adequate financial rewards. But money is not the way to overcome this obstacle. The situation must be dealt with instead by developing a new education for teachers (already being financed), and by producing for immediate use in any number of schools, the low-cost materials such a new education needs. On both points, the situation is favorable, and much experience justifies our optimism in speaking of a ten-year project. I will develop my proposal in detail in another work. Here it is offered as a suggestion to fertilize active minds, and perhaps to start the process of contagion.

207

9 Other Kinds Of Wealth

Our focus so far has been on the generation of economic wealth. But there are other types of wealth, of course, and here we broaden our focus to consider some of them â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and to consider an issue that many may not have associated with the activity of generating wealth: how it may bring into being a new stage of evolution. We will look first at the different types of wealth generated by Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus.

Knowledge, The Wealth Of Homo Sapiens The work of Homo Sapiens generates the wealth that the sciences know as intellectual facts, ranging from information about faraway stars and galaxies to information about the miniscule particles forming the nuclei of atoms. This wealth is deposited in the books and manuscripts held by libraries, and it brings dividends through the minds of the people curious enough to learn a portion of it.

209

The Generation of Wealth

The intellectual facts that constitute the contents of the sciences are the contents of the awarenesses of Homo Sapiens working in scientists. These awarenesses occurred over time, and Homo Sapiens has found that he can tell the history of these awarenesses by considering the chronology of their appearance and linking them together through the humans who first mentioned them. Like all awarenesses, this awareness of history was at first a new awareness. It spread as more people focused on the links between specific scientific awarenesses and on their development. This historical approach produced facts of awareness about facts of awareness, a new slant in the work of Homo Sapiens that endowed Homo Sapiens with new ways of knowing. Facts of awareness about facts of awareness generated new fields of knowledge and gave Homo Sapiens the openings that produce such human sciences as sociology and economics, which represent two perspectives through which human relations can be examined. As historical knowledge became more concerned with how successive generations treated the subjects and themes that people considered important, it changed itself into the new way of knowing called evolution, which can also be formulated as the permanent impact of time upon the happenings in the cosmos. To some, it soon became clear that evolution was neither arbitrary nor random. In the knowledge transmitted over the generations, there have been reflections upon the findings of earlier reflections, and it was such considerations that became philosophy, which at one time formed the essence of Homo Sapiensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; activities. In some, introspection led to the raw material that had been neglected by

210

9 Other Kinds Of Wealth

philosophers, and the examination of this material went on to form the psychologies, which are still thriving after their emergence more than 100 years ago. Homo Sapiens finds more and more in himself to become aware of and, in so doing, creates new sciences. The appearance of a science indicates that the facts of awareness behind it are significant and reachable both individually and collectively. In all, knowledge leads to new truths, which leads to new uses of the self and the objects of Man, which in turn lead to wealth. Although the content of Homo Sapiensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; knowledge has changed over the millennia and is still changing, the need to know has been permanent and is the motor that keeps Homo Sapiens alive in all humans.

Making Objects, The Wealth Of Homo Faber Homo Faber generates other kinds of wealth, in the areas of handicrafts, the arts, and technology. Because the creations classified under the name of crafts most often serve practical purposes, they are often regarded as a lower form of artifact than the creations that do not have a clearcut use. Cultural wealth generally does not move beyond the circle of those who contemplate and enjoy it, and do not exploit it to produce more wealth.

211

The Generation of Wealth

Craftmen, broadly speaking, can generate new wealth by developing techniques to use substances that otherwise would be lost or wasted. For example, it is the Homo Faber craftsman who made perishables like milk into foods like cheese, which can last almost indefinitely; or made grapes into wines and rice into whiskey, which is sold and bought years after grapes or rice would have become rotten. The Homo Faber craftsman also develops techniques that in some form maintain events and objects for use in the future. The recording of an orchestra concert is an obvious example. Another is mass-producing copies of works of art with general appeal, to be sold to tourists or to hang in hotel rooms. And so on. Homo Faber does not study or conduct research, that is the job of Homo Sapiens. Homo Faber invents actions, transforming or recasting useful materials. The invention of aluminum cans made the aluminum extracted from bauxite in the ground into wealth, not because people needed aluminum but because they needed cans. But when cans started littering the landscape, thereby wasting too much aluminum, Homo Faber discovered that recycling was less expensive than extracting aluminum from a mine. Making cans for all sorts of drinks required that there be something to open the cans, and Homo Faber found a new outlet by inventing can openers. Thus, one action led to another and then to another, each time enabling someone to produce wealth out of an idea.

212

9 Other Kinds Of Wealth

Consumption, The Wealth Of Homo Economicus Homo Economicus does not make things, nor does he research truth. His bias is to look around and find how new wealth can be generated out of old wealth. For example, he can ask the Homo Faber in him to make machine tools that in turn generate or manufacture tools that increase the generation of wealth; or he can ask both Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber to find out how to satisfy the desire to be surrounded by things pleasing to the eye or ear. Homo Economicus has found that consumption is a source of wealth, and he has made consumption a model for fields in which the consumption of something is not a necessity — as is, for example, the animal consumption of live organisms to maintain their energy. Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber have roots in the animal realms — that is, the realm ruled by instincts — but Homo Economicus does not. Homo Sapiens’ use of intelligence is not exclusively human, nor is the Faber-like incorporation of some non-somatic item to extend one’s reach beyond the physical endowment transmitted by heredity. But the questions that Homo Economicus poses to Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber to get their cooperation (questions that may not have come to them in the ordinary course of their functions) puts human intelligence beyond the useful and beyond the immediate. As Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber provided what was necessary, Homo Economicus gained more and more reality by showing that his actions generated new knowledge and new actions and new fields of study.

213

The Generation of Wealth

In particular, Homo Economicus enabled consumption to abandon its link to maintaining life, and made it become, more and more, the fulfillment of created desires, of projected adventures, of attempts to push forward the boundaries of action. Because of Homo Economicus, humans embarked upon the the creation of a man-made universe that they have superimposed onto the natural world. They have shifted the generation of wealth from its original involvement with the given, the already existing, to its modern involvement with the willfully made, and have created the possibility of generating new wealth in an indefinitely expanding, indefinitely renewable, exclusively human universe. In this artificial universe there is room for art, for crafts, for new transactions in which the capabilities of some can be used to meet the needs of others. Together, the three attributes of Man cooperate to gain yet one more new spot in that artificial universe, however small the spot may be. “New” is the operative word and is itself a new value, valued more every day. By shifting from a natural to an artificial environment, Man has given himself a very distinctive place in evolution — outside natural evolution but not in opposition to it. Man has needed the billions of years of the past in order to be, and to discover the process of evolution itself and extract from it anything Homo Sapiens can reach, Homo Faber can replicate, and Homo Economicus can make available to all. This generation of wealth has barely begun. It has needed the journeys we outlined in earlier chapters, in which Man first came to know himself as Homo Sapiens, by creating all the sciences; then as Homo Faber, by creating the successive

214

9 Other Kinds Of Wealth

technologies that Homo Sapiens could examine and, with new instruments of study, understand more profoundly; and recently as Homo Economicus, by attending to the yields of thoughts and actions.

The Wealth Of Experience All activities consume time and sometimes also perceptible amounts of energy. Time is given to us, and it dissipates by itself, because the movement of the earth (on itself and around the sun) generates time uniformly for all of us, in an irreversible manner, and this movement takes time from anyone who is not aware of it. But the given of time, as we have noted, can be exchanged for something else — for everything that humans pursue as one of their activities. Experience is the name for the perceptible equivalent of time that is spent rather than left simply to disappear. While time is given, experience is created. Hence, the most primitive generation of wealth is the transformation of time into experience. Time is a universal raw material out of which humans make all the things that are “objectivations of energy” — a pot, a novel, a hypothesis, a theorem. Time that is spent — actively exchanged for experience — leads to objectivations. Homo Economicus is more aware of the exchange of time for experience than is Homo Sapiens or Homo Faber, and attempts to obtain all things in less time, aiming for the point, we can suppose, when the movement of evolution is equivalent to the “nothings” of energy, which take almost no time to become real.

215

The Generation of Wealth

In this dynamic, the generation of wealth almost reaches its absolute.

Spiritual Wealth The great works of world literature are vivid illustrations of one kind of wealth that can be created in the exchange of time for experience. After 25 or more centuries, the works of Homer and Plato still affect the iner states of people, still enhance their imagination, giving a greater concreteness to their aspiration to stimulate more humanity in everyone and exercising their capacity to encompass more and more in one thought and one feeling which can serve as a measure of personal evolution. The Mahabharata is still the greatest compendium of human experience to be transmitted to numberless generations of humans who have been free to transmute its symbol and sayings into Man’s developing grasp of the inner world, in which the present fuses with all previous understandings. The Bhuddist scriptures are generators of the generators in each individual that produce the highest wealth: clarity in absolute calm, the non-transaction that is the true human way of transacting. This awareness, known as “the Tao of Lao Tsu,” might be framed more pithily but as precisely: “In the void, the non-action is the action.” Billions of Asians, without naming Lao Tsu, have reached a form of Homo Economicus at the spiritual level of Man, a simultaneous doing and knowing what the spirit can propose. The wealth valued by the spirit is acknowledged as transcending all other wealths and capable of exceeding their touch. This wealth is most likely to be found when all the

216

9 Other Kinds Of Wealth

passions of an individual are channeled towards the surrendering of his or her will to the Great Will and calling that act of submission a virtue. The highest teachings of the Christian church confirm this movement of the individual will toward the Great Will, an event that the church visualizes in the form of an innocent baby (or a very young child) open to the will of God — in other words, before the person’s will is mortgaged in the struggle for survival. The few genuine guides of humanity are a source of values that individuals strive to objectify in civilizations and cultures. In this process, we find the first step in the generation of spiritual wealth, which is the transmutation of value into wealth. But substantial numbers of people have been unable to remain fully dedicated to the highest achievement. For them, the dynamic of being is an oscillation between value and wealth, which are kept separate and at times are even seen as antagonists. To the perspective that pursuit of wealth is antagonistic to spiritual values, we owe the view that economic poverty is a virtue to be sought deliberately and constantly as a passport to the kingdom of heaven. I hasten to remind readers that Ghandhi held a constrasting view, that poverty is the greatest bondage, the yoke from which men must be free before they can undertake the articulation of their other gifts and talents.

The Wealth Of Cultures And Civilizations Cultures and civilizations are also a form of wealth, for they are the expression of certain values. The values that gain human approval — economic wealth, for example, or poverty — are

217

The Generation of Wealth

selected by a special sensitivity that blends with an intuition of what makes life worth living. The process harkens back to the animal realm, in which instincts provide the frame of reference for determining if a life is a true expression of a speciesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; place in evolution. Values provide the same function for humans. The lingering in humans of a way of being which in fact reduces the freedom to experiment with new values in one life, is acceptable only because of this link with the animal realm. It presents itself spontaneously because it is as objectively part of the fabric of being human as the DNA is part of the human soma. In the attribution of values (which makes people establish roots which become as real as oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s soma and therefore indispensable for living in the social universe) Man provides himself with the frame of reference he needs to objectify what he calls his destiny on earth. Because the link to existing values is more easily made than is the entry into a new universe of spiritual evolution, many more humans choose to frame their lives by existing values and to identify with systems of values which have been translated into systems of conduct that articulate the values. In this way of living, the objectified systems of conduct are taken to be realities, and the process that led to their objectification is generally ignored, at least for a time and by most people. Through such dynamics, cultures are objectified, and their continued generation is considered to be wealth, in both traditional cultures (because of the links with the past) and modern cultures (because they contain elements that establish the boundaries of permissible experimentation). Thus, it is fair to say that cultures are the analogues in human societies of species in the animal realm, because in both, individuals lose their individuality which is replaced by group directives.

218

9 Other Kinds Of Wealth

Cultures represent ways of being that are compatible with the demands emanating from larger entities called civilizations. Cultures are linked to a territory, civilizations are not. Civilizations are directly related to some real guide — an actual person — whose life inspires collective human evolution for centuries (and occasionally millennia); cultures are various objectifications of this inspiration, each of which takes into account the conditions of the particular people inspired, including their natural environment and their social or geographic setting. Civilizations allow the blending of cultures; cultures allow the blendings of individual differences within acceptable frames of behaviors. The values of a civilization correspond to a particular frame of reference (which, historically, always come from religions) within which one brand of human evolution occurs. The values held within the cultures of a civilization are transformations of the civilizations’ values to accommodate the factors brought in by regional or local history and geography. Thus, religions and civilizations overlap almost entirely; cultures, on the other hand, overlap only through the items supplied by the religion. They are separated one from the other by the items preceding the appearance of the religion and the conversion of the people in the region. Languages are a good example. They of course precede the event of conversion, and they divide rather than integrate. On the other hand, common beliefs and symbolisms unify, and they make people tolerant of differences. The commonalities could be emphasized but in fact are not.

219

The Generation of Wealth

Some examples of cultural wealth exemplify the civilization; others exemplify cultures. The form of the gothic cathedrals express the Christian civilization, but the settings and ornamentation variously express the Italian, French, Flemish, Spanish, British, or German cultures. Music transcends cultures, but can be marked by attributes that bring it back to the cultures. The same is true of dancing.

The Cultural Wealth Of Art Artistic manifestations of humans, which all require the gift of one’s time and energy, represent wealth to their several “creators,” not only those who dedicate themselves to the actual objectivation but also those who receive value from it. In both instances, participation of different kinds and levels constitutes an exchange of time for experience. The spectator is a witness that the work justifies giving one’s time to it rather than to something else. The actor is a witness to the value of living by proxy what has not come one’s way. The creator testifies to the value of the work as a blending of the gift of one’s time and one’s perception of what is really human, and the transmutation of this perception into a form that seeks to make it universal and thus available to all. One individual creation is done on behalf of all, for it frees others to create something else. Artistic manifestations show Homo Economicus emerging in new guises: letting others have their time and energy to produce their own creative work.

220

9 Other Kinds Of Wealth

In a commercial society, more and more people believe that cultural value goes with monetary value, and the creators of cultural work expect to receive a financial benefit for their products even though the work may have been done for one’s pleasure or to relieve oneself of tension. It is not always possible to connect financial return with creative work. For instance, creative minds engaged in activities that are not visibly related to what people are prepared to purchase (or sometimes even to consider), are said to be “ahead of their time,” and they receive no immediate worldly recognition for their creations, and may not even in their own lifetime. For these people the pursuit of a passion is the motive for creating “cultural wealth,” although the activity may only be socially justified when other people “connect” with the creations.

The Infinity Of Human Wealth However much some leaders have identified with their beliefs and their way of being, they could not eliminate in subjects or followers their own need to know and their own experiments. To eliminate this desire, the leaders would have had to destroy all their subjects, and this never fully happened in history. Human states of being are equal in numbers not only to the sets of humans but also to all the moments of their individual lives. Clearly, there are too many to be regulated or foreseen; which is one reason a totalitarian government must fail. The wealth that results from these variables can reasonably be conceived of as infinite. To handle such a vast potential requires

221

The Generation of Wealth

a permanent state of suspended judgment, an immense openness, a readiness to be moved in unsuspected ways and to participate willingly in the objectivation of unanticipated and new demands. All these human qualities and attributes, known by some if not yet by all, are in a way the wealth in question. Their presence is one of their manifestations, the one that brings something engendered by others to the state of perceptibility and sustains the assumption that much more is in store.

The Fifth Realm Of Evolution Once Man has become sensitive to the wealth that lies within human experience — most of which is yet to be realized — then the ratio of all that has been actualized to all that remains potential will properly be seen as almost nil, and this perception opens a future for Man on earth, indeed for Man in the cosmos, a future untouched by the past, though of course integrating it. A future for a human Man. Homo Spiritualis or Homo Cosmicus — if we are to give this future Man a name — will have an awareness extending through all previous pasts and objectivations and to a new realm of evolution, a fifth realm, which we can foresee in the transcendences that are now becoming the process of living itself. As I have briefly noted earlier, there so far have been four realms in evolution — the cosmic (atomic and molecular), the vital (plants), the animal, and the human. In each, something different is evolving. In the animal realm, it is instinct. In the human realm, it is the awareness of awareness. Now, it is possible to foresee a fifth realm.

222

9 Other Kinds Of Wealth

Instead of emphasing the hindrances that lock one in the past and in dynamics that lead nowhere, instead of seeing the “heaviness” of objectivations and declaring them to be eternal reality, the Man of the fifth realm of evolution will be conscious of all the nows that have passed and that have become part of the descending future, and will live consciously the perpetual transformation of the given into the potential. Unmoved by the given as given, moved instead by its latent potentials, Man in this fifth realm will reach the dynamics of “nothings” and with them a universe as easily maintained as were the constantly variable fields of the fourth realm of evolution — except that in the fifth realm the universe will consist of components of reality, which will be Man’s reality. With thinking and feeling made one, Man in the fifth realm will know that much of his unity comes from the contribution of the four previous realms to his freedom and evolution — the freedom of never being static, the freedom of being time rather than being in time, the evolution of realizing evolution in himself individually and, through the likes of him, collectively. In the fifth realm, the unity of mankind will no longer be conceived of as a matter of compromises and adjustments, achieved by tolerating the odd and dissimilar. Instead, it will be reached as it had been reached in previous realms: the neutral cosmos, where matter is objectified energy, whatever its denomination; in the neutral universe of plants, where cells transmute matter into forms, functional enough to remain on earth forever; in the neutral universe of animaldom, where all constellations of behavior are tested for viability; and now in the neutral universe of creation, where all merge to reproduce the

223

The Generation of Wealth

whole in everyone. The fifth realm constitutes a transcendence of each station, to dwell in transcendence and to live the reality of time as the process of energy transformation, as human life itself. In the fifth realm, Homo Economicus will be satisfied at having reached efficiency per se, Homo Faber at excelling in turning “nothings” into other “nothings” or into things, Homo Sapiens at knowing at last that knowing is creation from nothing. The journeys of evolution always lead to a new departure, and today no less than ever before. The objectified universe that Man has made exists both as moments of creation capable of coming out of time and lasting forever, and as moments of creation that reach toward creation itself by trying all that is possible, culminating in the new launching of the fifth realm, which does not need the instants of objectivation to rejoin the stream of creativity, does not need the forms of previous realms to prove itself. The succession of long journeys covering billions of years do seem to have had only one end: to enable energy and time to know themselves and all they can do together. The journeys of evolution have accomplished this by objectifying successively the four realms, a process that we in the fourth realm know as efforts to realize all that is possible in each realm and then, each time, to reach the impasse of knowing itself and to move to other modes of being, until time and energy as “nothings” come into their own in Man of the fifth realm.

224

9 Other Kinds Of Wealth

We can reasonably foresee that the stretch of time allotted to this new realm will be shorter than the short time of the fourth realm, but this will not affect the quality of time that will characterize living through the whole duration of life. In the fifth realm, moments of intense living in full consciousness will be the rule rather than the exception. The contact of energy with itself will make awareness the climate of all moments. In the fifth realm to live will be to create life rather than endure it or let it pass or puzzle about its appearance. Being created all the time, life will generate new states of being barely suspected in the fourth realm, and with these new states will come new configuration of the possibilities of energy and time held in a consciousness that sees behind all objectivations the “nothings” they truly are. In the fifth realm, the generation of wealth will not center on wealth but on generation reached in itself, with various wealths as its by-products. In the fifth realm, the problems of the fourth realm will not appear different than the challenges of the first three realms looked to the fourth. A matter-of-fact approach will separate the distracting elements from the actual problems, and the problems will be understood as exercises for the new awareness, difficulties that no longer are catastrophic and that now are soluble by an easy change in outlook. In a world economy, as an example, competition will be replaced by a balance of all the contributions of all the peoples, who will now live in contact with their inner wealths and as easily, be creative everywhere on earth. Based on the dynamics of “nothings,” the fifth realm will make room for the reality that significant and beneficial changes can come from anywhere and anybody. The creative individual will be the central point of radiation, and

225

The Generation of Wealth

since he or she can be anywhere and anyone, our world will be covered by overlapping “circles of efficiency” and no longer will be dependent on a few non-overlapping circles of production and on financing centered on London, New York, or Moscow, each of which today makes its decisions selfishly. In the fifth realm, the emphasis will be on the earth as a whole and as our unique habitat, and on a new kind of equality: access to all the wealth of the universe so that everyone can contribute to the growth of wealth and thus make life more abundant. The road to the fifth realm will have the fewest obstacles when we include inner spiritual wealths in our understanding of wealth and consider them the new frontiers for Homo Sapiens, Homo Faber, and Homo Economicus, working as one, integrated in a way of being that sees our earth as an indivisible home, Homo Telluricus.

226

10 Summing Up

The preceding chapters have covered a large territory. They have put before readers many notions, ideas, and proposals to assist them in a varied examination of the generation of wealth. Let us survey the field of our study and summarize our accomplishment.

The Awareness Of Homo Economicus By reaching out to Homo Economicus, an attribute of Man, we have gained the opportunity to replace the anonymous economy, an entity standing out there accessible only to specialists using sophisticated instruments, by an awareness that makes economic matters part of each of us â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and to varying degrees, makes each of us a part of the economy. This awareness gives each of us a place in the economy of the planet. Once we attain the awareness of Homo Economicus, we each find inner room for introspection and reflection on this aspect of human life and on how it can be expressed in our own lives and in our transactions with others. No one can say what the consequences of such study might be and whether the problems that today

227

The Generation of Wealth

loom large and are felt as urgent might not find solutions that contribute to a transformation of our world in harmony with human evolution. Homo Economicus seems to be a valid contribution to the collective understanding of how economic facts can be grasped and worked on. In my experience, the presence of Homo Economicus was revealed when I focused on questions of efficiency in regard to our use of ourselves in the part of the social fabric carrying our material well-being. Not only could I find Homo Economicus in myself, but I could give it roles to play in an array of individual and collective manifestations. Homo Economicus at once assumed a considerable place in our lives, and joined with other awarenesses, provided a deeper capacity to influence the present and the future â&#x20AC;&#x201D; within political boundaries as they exist today, but also beyond, perhaps reaching the whole of Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s real habitat, the earth.

History And The Experiments In Awareness After we aligned Homo Economicus with the rich awarenesses of which Man has been capable from the moment he left the animal realm, we examined the central importance of awareness in understanding the unfolding of history. We saw how Man experiments and reaches truth and then alters his milieu, recognizing (implicitly at least) that the environment is independent of him only as a concept. In reality, the environment has been made and remade by generation after generation, all contributing their time and energy to know the environment and affect it.

228

10 Summing Up

Such remaking has proceeded to the point that reality today can be seen mainly in terms of time and energy. The truth is, we make our world, and thus, reality is our time and our energy. It follows, then, that the physical and social environment can be affected by Man’s awareness of himself as an evolving energy. To affect the environment deliberately is a possibility available to everyone, even if the effect is no more than an act of individual pollution.

Awareness, Education, And Change Some movements of history have produced governments and institutions with access to much greater amounts of energy than any individual can muster, but others have led certain civilizations to the discovery that the contributions of individuals, not institutions, generate changes, in particular changes benefiting groups or collectivities. This enhancement of the role and place of individuals in altering Man’s relation to his environment can be found in the awarenesses, over 2500 years old, that joined the names of Archimedes to a principle and Confucius to social teachings. Today we can point to the “earth consciousness” that made our present generation so acutely aware that we have the collective responsibility to make the world a better place for everyone. These examples illustrate a human way of working on problems that is exemplified in the content of this book. To use awareness to contribute to change, we need to draw on an analytic-synthetic approach that respects the place and role of the whole. Homo Economicus works well only when Homo

229

The Generation of Wealth

Sapiens and Homo Faber are also active in apprehending reality and in developing the proposals to make reality more human and more concerned with humans. We have seen how rare such an approach is and the difficulty in making new understandings available to others. That is why the various sciences are important, and the education of awareness essential. But more significant for this study is the fact that Man, no doubt very early, found that there are two ways of learning: directly and by proxy. The first is necessary when Man confronts the unknown with no guide other than the awareness of his awareness â&#x20AC;&#x201D; in other words, his capacity to observe himself, which enables him in particular to turn mistakes into useful experiments. The second way of learning is more critical for collective progress because it stimulates learning at the smallest cost in time and energy. Homo Economicus favors proxy learning, while Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber need both direct and proxy learning to give form to their understandings. Whenever a single individual makes real progress that he can express in non-personal terms, then direct learning becomes available to others through proxy learning. Once Archimedes understood the explanation for his ability to float in a swimming pool, he made it unnecessary for anyone else to reach the same discovery, other than to confirm it. From an individual, the awareness became collective.

230

10 Summing Up

Awareness And Individual Learning Once we turn from the history of the sciences, where genius or luck makes some human individuals singular and makes collective progress a matter of chance, to examine a common phenomenon experienced by almost everybody on earth, we give ourselves a very different springboard for finding hope for the future in a world in which cultures and civilizations still divide Mankind and encourage biases and conflicts. When we discovered, for example, that every baby uses the first months in the social environment to give himself the numerous keys necessary to acquire the language of the environment, usually in the first two years after birth, and that all the while other learnings, like standing and walking, are not delayed nor hampered, we saw that every baby was a learner â&#x20AC;&#x201D; that the reality of a baby is to be a learner â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and we learned that independence, autonomy, and responsibility were components of all the spontaneous learnings of early childhood. These components belong to every individual, no matter how young, who is involved in learning alone what no one can teach him or her, wishes to teach him, or indeed would know how to teach him. When we next gathered that what true learners do after early childhood (including all original scientists in their mature years) is similar to what all babies do, we realized what an enormous source of new wealth is available to Mankind. That every human being comes into the world with awareness and a powerful capacity and need to learn. In this reality lies our greatest hope for the future.

231

The Generation of Wealth

Awareness And Future Wealth It is easy to see wealth in a seam of gold in the ground and to see that the process of extracting it to use it for other goods require an expenditure smaller than the gain. Wealth is the result of the expenditure. Similarly, all that is required today to sense that life on earth in the years to come does not need to resemble what it has been before, is to hold up our discovery of the rich and numerous mines in our inner lives. No one would deny that gold and diamond mines existed before they were discovered and then exploited, and no one denies that such exploitation made ordinary ground of little usefulness into wealth. We have indicated many times throughout this study that wealth exists in the mines represented by our human creative minds. Here, it should be added that this wealth will exist only when enough people see that our minds are the sources of all wealth, past, present, and future. And see as well that now we have the means of “exploiting” these mines for the benefits of all, through the education of awareness. At this point the reader should pause to consider this proposition. Is it true that all the sources of wealth are in human minds stretching over millennia up to and including our period? I believe the answer can be found in another question: Is it not true that all the items in a man-made universe clearly come from human minds that envisioned them? Since only Man studied and understood nature and made it yield much more than did all the creatures before him, it is Man’s mind that perceived possibilities behind his perceptions and reached for

232

10 Summing Up

them, integrating them, in his uses of nature. Thus, he proves to himself and to all of us that his mind is the source of new wealth at every stage and in every move of his progress.

Education, Change, And Evolution If a study such as we have conducted in this book leads us to the recognition that in a field barely acknowledged among the current preoccupations of Homo Sapiens we can find sources of new wealth — precisely those needed to liberate mankind from the impositions created by the needs of survival — and to place in mankind’s hands the very dynamics that generate wealth, then we must give these sources all our attention. Because they exist in everyone, education becomes the key to “mining” them. In examining the economics of education we found that it may be possible to offer the young generations of humans everywhere sufficient contact with the processes of learning to give them the opportunities to make the environment yield more and more for each investment of time, investments infused with experience and reality. Education is an instrument, the instrument evolution has developed to realize itself. As an instrument, it makes things happen; and pre-eminent among them are the events that follow upon the realization that true wealth is made of time and energy working together.

233

The Generation of Wealth

“Nothings” And The Future As we have seen, time and energy have very different characteristics. Time is a given, is everybody’s property, and all of us have enough of it to produce our experiences and to fill our lives. But energy is a variable, and the amounts we have partly depend on how we use ourselves. Energy works differently in the physical cosmos than it does in the mind. As “nothings” have become more important in human life and it has become apparent that the law of energy transformations in humans is not ruled by the conservation principle of thermodynamics (valid in the cosmos, of course), the minds of humans see more clearly that many intractable challenges of today change their character and become capable of being resolved. The high-tech revolutions in economically advanced societies are making “nothings” both common and “user friendly.” But “nothings” have always been at work in every one of us. There are in the remarkable work that we accomplished inutero, where the self changed time and energy into an extremely efficient system (which I call the soma) and left behind, as supervisors of this system, “nothings” that remain in contact with the system’s dynamic structure and its maintenance (which I call the psyche). Later, when we are exutero, each of us, while remaining in contact with our somapsyche, learns how to use “nothings” to exchange time into experience, with its myriads of forms and objectivations.

234

10 Summing Up

An Economics Of Plenty The two movements of reaching in every human the competence to use both time and “nothings” to one’s benefit in creating something new and the ability to maintain this creation in a functioning state, will become the backbone of all suggestions to provide our earth with an economy to sustain populations everywhere while at the same time enabling them to move towards an economics of plenty. This process will be in line with the process started long ago, when Homo Economicus first appeared as no more than a germ of what it has now become, all the while exercising its subconscious influence until, during the last two centuries, it has come out into the open. We can entertain the probability of a constant generation of wealth because the mind is its source and because education can make the generation of wealth a part of human evolution.

Homo Economicus And The Generation Of Wealth A necessary test for any proposal on the generation of wealth must be that specialists in all of its various expressions agree that nothing of their true contributions is lost in the new approach. If possible, each of these contributions should be seen as a mental proposal involving ways of going beyond the present. Perhaps in their criticisms of the proposal advanced here, specialists will ask some of the questions we put to ourselves, and examine in their own thinking the presence or

235

The Generation of Wealth

absence of the considerations we have raised. Perhaps they will find that “generation of wealth” is only an axiom in or a consequence of their studies, and not the cardinal objective to which, we have argued, all the sciences will contribute something. Perhaps, too, this monograph, with its unusual approach and its strange suggestions will serve purposes not connected with writings on economics but will still be recognized as a work deeply concerned with economics. To have looked at economic transactions as the manifestations of Homo Economicus — one form of Man’s self-awareness — restores the integrity of Man and allows the whole of him to make its impact on those transactions, now properly seen as human expressions. In this light, perhaps the ten-year educational scheme proposed as a way of preparing the economics of the Third World to meet their future development, will look less quixotic and, to the contrary, appear firmly placed in the logic of life on earth.

236