Category: Politics

  • On matters of governance

    One would assume that by now, we have all come to a consensus that there is no perfect system of political governance and that our best hope currently lies in finding a good balance of principles between different governance systems.

    A more controversial proposition may be that all forms of governance are capable of progressing society under the right conditions. This may contradict the common notion that representative democracy carries the day in this regard, but a closer inspection of the evidence in my view shows it to be more nuanced than that.

    The obvious example in this regard is China, to which many will cry out: “It’s a capitalist economy!” The fact of the matter, however, is that the governance is communist from hair strand to toenail. Needless to say, it is important to distinguish governance from economic systems, which many seem not to.

    In addition to China, the dictators in the Middle East seem to also have a good grasp on the concept of progressing society, or shall we continue to pretend that there is a resemblance of democracy in Saudi Arabia or Dubai just because there is some affiliation with western society. We might not be agreeable to the methodology of chopping off heads, but shall we deny that they have well developed societies?

    Having sufficiently poked the bear and provoked thought, to which i am certain to get pushback, let us progress the conversation with a brief look into the concept of democracy. I am fascinated by it; it carries with it so much promise, yet I cannot get over its basic premise, which I earnestly believe to be fundamentally flawed. Democracy assumes that the majority is always right! I do not feel the need to expand on why this is incredibly erroneous, surely dearest reader, you get it, right?

    Whereas in history, humanity has strived to prove that their system of governance is the one system to rule them all, I am of the opinion that we should readjust our perspective to focus not on the systems themselves but the objectives of governance. At the heart of it all, what we are attempting to do is allocate the right resources to the ideas that progress society in the most efficient, incorruptible way possible. Easier said than done, but maybe it’s not an entirely hopeless endeavor, isn’t it. By focusing our efforts on this primary objective, we place ourselves in a position where we are less likely to be predudicial about the origins of the idea and focus more on its merits and pitfalls.

    In the same spirit of focusing on objectives, we ought to also place emphasis on applying our minds towards identifying and resolving societal issues individually and in relation to the ecosystem of society’s challenges. This idea of focusing on actual issues brings to attention the next item of discussion, i.e., the concept of representation.

    For practical reasons, all forms of current governance involve officials who represent the needs and wants of the broader society. What differs from system to system is the manner by which these representatives are selected, whether it be public/private vote or by placement from those with authority. The intent of representation is to select the personnel best suited in skill and temperament to understand and address the concerns of society in a specific area of expertise. The practical reality is that representation is fraught with corruption driven by personal ambition, which renders the exercise meaningless and often results in a frustrated society who fail to see any meaningful change with each elected official.

    Some systems of selection seem to perform slightly better than others in selecting representatives, but in reality, it all boils down to the same soup. Whereas a strongman may pick his bloodline, to which we all know that knowledge, wisdom, and skill are not sexually transmitted attributes; a democratically elected official is equally a nonsensical approach as it assumes that one will actually do what they say they will do. In my view, taking one’s word as gospel is equally as stupid as the strongman’s methodology, but that’s just me, I guess. The more we ponder on the concept of representation, the more we realize that it is a case of choosing the lesser evil, and eventually, it will ultimately end in tears.

    Maybe a better approach to it all is to collect the various ideas to issues from society and then select from those ideas which ones to implement regardless of the representative or even without a specified one. This obviously has its own challenges, but let us entertain the thought for a moment. The concept that what is important is implementing the right idea rather than attempting to pick the right person to find and execute an idea. It is certainly an interesting view and one that speaks directly to our desire to place emphasis on the resolution of actual issues.

    I will leave the thought itching here and scratch in a future article where we will begin laying out the foundational framework of modern governance.

  • A thought on education

    I am not a fan of the global education system, it is not designed to pass on knowledge. Rather it is designed as a competition of memorizing information, which is something i abhor. I refuse to believe that the vast majority of people are not intelligent as the schools’ grading systems will have us believe. Instead i feel they may be misinformed, ill-informed, un-informed, misunderstood, dis-interested or any other of a plethora of information dissemination mishaps. Dare I say, anyone who understands the sentence, “the wind blew of my hat” has already shown a clear understanding of physics. True education is about making people realize that they already understand all that is taught and what we are just doing now is organizing the information into groups which we call subjects. Realize that, anyone who can go shopping and come back home has at least a rudimentary understanding geography, and anyone who knows the reason why two people broke up has an inherent understanding of history and its consequences. And because everyone understands these things, everyone therefore has the inherent intellectual capacity to understand any subject matter on the planet. The problem is not the intellect, the real problem is the drab, dry, lifeless brain fucking wo obtain in the monotonous boredom called a lecture

  • Developing a bread basket index

    Developing a bread basket index

  • Optimizing Governments Through Resource Management

    Optimizing Governments Through Resource Management

  • A look at the concept of Single Tax

    A look at the concept of Single Tax

  • Value Based Minimum Wage

    Value Based Minimum Wage

    My layman’s understanding of minimum wage is that it is the amount of money one needs to be paid in order to survive in a money based society. Our current approach to setting such minimum wages focuses on the quantitative value of the money to be paid rather than what the money enables the individual to do. This approach couple with the process and governance around minimum wage provide a loophole for exploitation that is naturally pounced upon in a capitalist society. This article will explore a Value Based Minimum wage approach which i believe is a better way to look at the issue

    Minimum wages have been defined as “the minimum amount of remuneration that an employer is required to pay wage earners for the work performed during a given period, which cannot be reduced by collective agreement or an individual contract”

    International Labour Organization

    The challenge of numerical based minimum wage

    Traditionally minimum wage is set through a legislative process, broadly paraphrasing, this usually means that a political representative must raise the issue in a legislative body, the issue is debated and resolutions are made which may or may not result in the change of a previously set numerical value. The fundamental problem with this approach is that it requires constant monitoring of whether this figure is relevant at any point in time as prices are affected by such things as inflation, supply/demand and more. This constant monitoring never happens as legislative bodies are by their nature slow and methodical. Furthermore, it is not in the best interest of society to structure processes that require constant unending legislative arguments, time is humanity’s most valuable resource and it can never be recovered.

    The Alternative Value Based Minimum Wage Approach

    A reasonable alternative to the aforementioned method is to look at which activities an employee must do to have a reasonable quality of life, consider the method of valuing these activities and allow the numerical renumeration to automatically change based on these factors with a buffering factor to allow for predictability which is essential in corporate forecasting.

    This proposal of course is not the magic bullet, it has it own faults that must be addressed but on the balance of play, I believe that it provides better benefits to society as a whole. At the very least, it shifts political discussion on minimum wage from ‘how much’ and ‘what can you do with it’.

    Considerations in setting a value based minimum wage

    Wages and Salaries are a major part of business expenditure and as such it is a hot button topic; any consideration on the value of wages must balance the need of the employer against the need of the employee. In the modern competitive world, more often than not, the employer’s consideration takes precedence as wages are a low hanging fruit to cost cutting in business expenditures. An important aspect of consideration when it comes to minimum wage is the percentage of lower income earning employees on the whole corporate wage bill. My early inclination is that this is actually quite low such that the net effect of minimum wage on the current financial metrics is minimal.

    Another consideration to make also relies on the nature of the employer, one wonders if the minimal acceptable payment for someone who is working at a mom and pops business should be the same as that of a large multinational conglomerate. Should there be a ratio factor that ties the minimum earning individual to the maximum earning individual in a corporate body? The basis of this query is that often upper-level management will get bonuses for figuring out how to cut costs but lower earning employees may actually get their earnings cut as part of cost cutting exercises. By tying in a maximum earner to minimum earner ratio in wage legislature, the decision to cut wage costs becomes more carefully weighed by upper management in corporate organizations. The downside of this idea however is that cost cutting exercises become validated as corporate bodies say everyone is affected equally yet upper income earners main still gain more in bonuses and benefits.

    Assumptions of a value based minimum wage

    The fundamental assumption that a value based minimum wage approach has is that any employed individual has a set of parents and at least one child and calculations must allow this quadrant to survive. I believe that this is critical as it considers real world context of employees and ensures that renumeration is practical. It must be understood however that once this approach is taken, consideration of social securities such as retirement funds and childcare become inevitable. The goal is to fairly compensate without bloating corporate expenses.

    An alternative look at this would be to use real-time information of a person’s dependents to fine tune their minimum earnings. The benefit of this is that if one has many dependents they would not necessarily be punished for having a large family. On the other hand such an approach requires government to obtain a significant amount of individual information such that considerations for privacy become a huge factor. It is in this regard that I believe the first approach carries slightly more merit

    Parameters for a Value Based Minimum Wage

    At the very minimum one must be able to afford to feed one’s family, pay bills, travel to work, be healthy enough to do that work well, remain with something that helps them improve (savings, education) and have some degree of leisure. These considerations must be made with an awareness of how other social interventions are made by government; for example, if government already has a robust public medical health system, then it makes no sense to duplicate the benefit. From this basic assumption of life, we build our foundational parameters as:

    • Medical Aid
    • Food & Clothing
    • Transportation
    • Bills
    • Self-Improvement
    • Social Activity

    Medical Aid

    I consider medical aid as one of the trickier things to evaluate, on one hand, it would be an insult to provide only enough coverage for medical checkups and dental flossing and on the other hand, it would be monstrous to provide enough coverage for an experimental procedure for a rare disease. The sweet spot lies somewhere in between, possibly around the area where you can afford to have an operation after an accident. The said medical aid must cover both the employee and the core assumed unit family.

    Food & Clothing

    An interesting aspect of food and clothing is that there is a heavy element of cultural bias. Regardless of this however, i think the actual calculation of this parameter is easy to ascertain, what is more debatable is what should be included and how much of it. In the case of food for instance, should it be three meals and what consists of a standard breakfast or lunch and so forth? One thing that is certain is that there will be a need for a bread-basket index that tracks the value of food in time as well as some form of lifestyle index to track clothing costs. This parameter should be a calculation that is based on the core assumed family unit.

    Bread Basket Article

    Transportation

    Transportation is the most straight-forward parameter to consider. It is simply the cost of transport required for the average employee to get to work and back which is doubled to assume the child’s costs of going to school and back.

    Bills

    The are two types if bills that are important namely, rentals and Municipal Bills in particular (water and electricity); depending on what is possible within an economy, a case can be made for the inclusion of internet as a basic human need. The calculation of rentals should be based on the market averages for a 3-bed apartment and the municipal bill should also be the municipal average for a

    Self-Improvement

    Self-improvement speaks mainly to the ability to save for a desire to pay to equip oneself with new skills. I believe that the ideal index to use that is easy to evaluate is to factor in a industry advice percentage of wage savings. for example, the current industry advice is that savings should be at least 15% of earning thus all that would be required is to add a +15% after other calculations.

    Social Activity

    Optimization Factors

    It is worth taking into account as well the relative prosperity of the nation as a factor of minimum wage considerations. As a territory that is under governance increases in prosperity, it stands to reason that the lifestyle of the least paid individual must follow.

    Time Elasticity: The period of time before the

    Valuation of Parameters

    The Value Based Minimum Wage Equation

    Payout of the Value Based Minimum Wage

    An interesting idea is that the calculated value of the Minimum wage does not necessarily have to be the paid-out value.

    Concluding Thoughts

    References

    https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/wages/minimum-wages/definition/WCMS_439072/lang--en/index.htm
  • Human Interaction: How We Argue

    Human Interaction: How We Argue

    i find that a vast majority of people rely on unfounded conjecture which occurs naturally due to the vast information ether that we live in. It is simply impossible to know it all as such we spread half truths and sometimes complete falsehoods because we do not have a full understanding of what we are talking about and instead offer information based on our limited experience.

    An easy example of this behavior comes from classic arguments such as which is better, apple or android? Very few people understand technology, even the fundamentals of it, therefore they make arguments which are incredibly false based on corporate branding messages and “personal experience”.

    for the most part, this type of behavior is harmless, after all, phone arguments never really convince anyone who already has a brand loyalty, but often times this behavior spreads to areas such as economics, politics, medical health, social infrastructure and so forth and fundamentally poisons the well of societies.

    Take for example the argument that socialism is all evil and capitalism is all good. This is obviously flawed thinking and intelligent societes have travessed this and found balance between the polititcal systems. Those of us who claim the obsolute evilness of one system over another based on “exprerience” will most likely have very little understanding of political philosophy and our world view is mostly shaped by selective political media.