Wednesday, September 3, 2014

«Center for the Development of Social Relationships, LLC»

We have complete confidence that modern society has an enormous potential for development. We also believe that current conditions prevent our potential from being fully developed and cause challenges such as unemployment, the high cost of housing, the growing gulf between rich and poor, constantly increasing levels of stress, economic instability, and inefficiency of scientific and technological progress. The project we have in mind is at the preliminary stage. Our small group has analyzed existing problems and set forth some initial steps toward solutions.

Here is our analysis of two problems that impede social progress.

1.    The first problem is the existence of luxury products and luxury features.
·        Civilization spends a significant amount of its vital resources on the creation of luxury articles. However, since luxury articles do not by themselves have any socially useful functions, these expenditures are completely useless for society, and significant vital resources are wasted.
·        Most people find luxury articles alluring because such products embody success and define an individual’s social importance. When many people strive after luxury, they create a demand that diverts resources from those who are actually contributing to social well-being.
2.    The second problem is people’s lack of social protection.
·         At present each person is left to fend for him or herself. The higher a person’s income, the greater the degree to which he or she is physically protected. The lower one’s income, the more vulnerable one becomes, (Status and Stress (By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF) The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity by Michael Marmot, M. G. Marmot) sometimes to the point of risking physical death. This fact forces people to become brutal and grab whatever they can grab; it spawns greed and sometimes leads to a form of insanity in which the accumulation of money becomes a goal in and of itself, driving people to uncontrolled and endless money-grubbing. It is precisely the risk of physical vulnerability and physical death (remote but nonetheless real) that is the root cause of such vices as greed and can lead to the insanity of uncontrolled money-grubbing.
·         The lack of real physical support from society is a main factor in the formation of phenomena such as stress.
·         Stress has a negative effect on labor productivity.
·         Stress is responsible for most cases of suicide, cardiovascular disease, premature death, etc.

To get a better picture of the problem, it is helpful to watch a few documentaries on luxury. Then, reflect on the irrationality of spending our vital resources this way.

Take a look at how our labor and materials are put to use…
Goods that are obviously extravagant and opulent are only the most visible part of the tribute being paid to luxury by our civilization. Significantly greater expenditures of labor go to the insertion of luxury features (in varying proportions) into at least one half of ordinary consumer goods produced for consumption by people of average means.

A list of luxury goods, provided by the authors of a Wikipedia article on luxury - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_vehicle, includes more than one hundred automobile brands. We can add to that list many other cars that include luxury features to a lesser degree, and imagine the amount of labor and materials spent producing them.

Look at the series of documentary films Planet Luxury

Look at the enormous amount of labor poured into the creation of Bentley automobiles.

The life of luxury may seem attractive to some, but we believe that our ideas of beauty have been formed on the basis of values tacitly agreed upon, in which luxury plays a very significant role in a person’s life.


PROJECT: The creation of conditions to optimize economic progress

We don’t aim to improve market principles, but rather to create conditions most favoring the functioning of the free market and the more efficient development of society as a whole.

The project’s goals are:

1. Creating conditions under which the ownership of luxury goods will no longer bring benefits; and then directing the resources freed up from the production of luxury goods toward the development of socially useful projects and scientific and technological progress.
2. Freeing up people’s time, so they have three or four days per week free.
3. Significantly decreasing stress due to increased social protection.
4. Creating working conditions that make a choice of profession or change of profession much easier. This in turn will facilitate a decrease in stress, along with an increase in the productivity and quality of work.
5. Creating conditions most favorable to the development of inventiveness, creativity, scientific research, and education.
6. Creating conditions under which crime, racial intolerance, ethnic intolerance will be naturally eliminated from society.


PART ONE
LUXURY

In this project, we explain the essence of the problem. The project does not include any plans for directly hindering the production of luxury goods.
The project will only engage in the formation of conditions under which luxury will lose its allure in people’s minds, after which the production of luxury goods will experience a correction due to market forces alone.

To emphasize again, this project does not include any plans for banning luxury articles. The goal of the project is to create conditions under which luxury will naturally lose its significance in people’s consciousness and gradually disappear as a phenomenon.

First let’s take a look at the word “luxury.”

The dictionary defines “luxury” as something not essential but conducive to pleasure and comfort; something expensive or hard to obtain; sumptuous living or surroundings. Another way to define a luxury good is one that is expensive but non-essential. Luxury can also be defined as excess in comfort and pleasures, connected to the squandering of wealth.
But we propose to expand the meaning of the word. Luxury should be defined as objects or services not essential to human beings, including those which include superfluous functions and superfluous design features whose purpose is not to raise quality but to raise prices with the goal of limiting access, thus transforming them (partially or completely) into symbols of wealth

(Let’s not confuse luxury with comfort, because within reasonable limits, comfort is an essential need. Only excesses in comfort should be classified as luxury.)

Luxury goods include absolutely all jewelry made of precious metals and gems; automobiles whose prices exceed a reasonable maximum; dwellings whose size exceeds a reasonable number of square feet; furniture manufactured from expensive woods or with superfluous design features; fashionable clothing in which the price reflects the designer’s name, the producer’s brand, etc.

Luxury goods are so popular that to one degree or another, luxury features are present in a broad spectrum of the most varied goods. In other words, an enormous number of goods and services include some non-functional addition whose main purpose is to bring a higher price.

For example, the price of an ordinary assembly-line electric water kettle for making tea can vary from about 15 dollars to about 600 dollars. But the functionality and the quality of the materials used are basically not much different. Close examination leads to the conclusion that price increases can be justified up to about 50-80 dollars. From the practical point of view, further increases in the kettle’s price have diminishing significance and pursue one goal only – that of artificially limiting access to the item through the use of more costly materials, unnecessary expenditures of labor and unnecessary design features.

I can foresee objections along the following lines – there is no such thing as superfluous design, and a beautiful design sometimes costs a great deal of money. I disagree, first of all because beauty in design is a relative concept. In the final analysis, design is beautiful or attractive when it has a definite practical purpose, inseparably connected with generally accepted values. If a luxury good incorporating precious metals and gems seems in the eyes of the ordinary person to have some vitally important value, then that is because those precious metals and gems enter into our mind’s concept of beauty to a significant degree. A 600-dollar tea kettle, glittering with genuine gold leaf and sporting a handle that has been twisted into fanciful shapes and carved with colorful patterns, will look beautiful to us. But if the significance and value of the precious metals and gemstones incorporated by that $600 tea kettle were to suddenly disappear, would we see it as so beautiful?

A logical question arises. Why, then, do people “need” luxury (or luxury features), if they are not physically necessary for human life? What makes luxury so alluring?

The fact is that luxury fulfills a most important function in a person’s life. By giving a visual demonstration of a person’s level of success and his or her social status, luxury defines a person’s significance in society. In other words, luxury is a symbol that gives visual proof of its owner’s social importance.

The determination of a person’s social importance is extraordinarily important for every single person. Money acts as a marker of importance. The higher the amount of money earned by a person, the higher his or her social status. But a person’s earnings cannot be directly seen by other people.  For that reason, a person feels obliged to give visual form to part of his or her money by transforming it into luxury goods and good with luxury features, thus demonstrating his value and importance. Luxury and luxury features have penetrated all the goods surrounding us, at all social levels. Luxury requires colossal investments of our labor and materials, but its sole purpose is to demonstrate its owners’ social significance! Colossal human resources are engaged in the production of uninspired symbols.

It is probably not necessary to explain how much it matters to people to be able to demonstrate their social importance and position in society.

Indeed, it is a vital need. A person’s social significance is a basic part of the evolutionary mechanism which forms and improves human beings.

Social importance has always played a crucial role in the selection of a mate and in the formation of business and social ties; and luxuries (or luxury features) have always been the sole visual expression of a person’s “quality.”

The link between luxury and success is so deeply rooted in our consciousness that at times, people can derive psychological satisfaction from an article of luxury even when they own it in private, with no ability to flaunt it for everyone to see. This of course nullifies the sole value the article luxury had – that of visually demonstrating its owner’s importance.

But the problem is not in the fact that people need to define their personal worth, but in the fact that this is being done in such a wasteful manner.

Giving visual form to a person’s importance is currently only possible through the transformation of part of his or her savings into symbols that are expensive, very labor-intensive, and completely useless for society.

This is where the heart of the problem lies.

So, is the creation of mere symbols worth all the expenditure of labor and materials that go into them?

Consider ancient Egypt. (See Dr. Richard Redding’s Pyramids and Protein.)
Egypt destroyed itself by squandering resources on the creation of stone pyramids. Over the course of centuries, millions of people and millions of tons of food were sacrificed to stone symbols of prosperity, which slowly starved and eventually killed a once-mighty civilization.

Yes, common sense tells us that spending on luxury is absurd and destructive to society.

For example, let’s look at some examples of spending by Great Britain. The government of that country appropriates about 500 million dollars a year for cancer research. In the same country, private persons invest their money in soccer clubs. The price of one such club can exceed 500 million dollars… Are these two uses of 500 million dollars of equal merit? Which type of investment has greater value for humanity and for the investors themselves?

The benefits to society from scientific research into the causes and cures of cancer can be understood by everyone, but what benefits flow to society from the purchase of a soccer club? It doesn’t take much effort to understand that such an investment does not benefit society in any way. There is no benefit to the sports world, the game of soccer, or even to the specific club changing hands, which can earn money for its development on its own. The only benefit from such an investment can be to the actual purchaser, who obtains a potential (not guaranteed) profit from resale. But if the purchaser of the club or one of his relatives suddenly comes down with a disease, say leukemia, for which there is no cure, then the erroneous nature of such a foolish investment may become apparent, even to the purchaser. Nevertheless, soccer clubs are bought and sold… Why? The fact is that along with the potential for making more money, the owner acquires a status symbol, showing his extremely high social status. Ownership of a soccer club is the ownership of famous group of athletes. In a certain sense, it is the ownership of other human beings, and there are only a few people in this world who can afford such a luxury – only the elite. In this sense, the soccer club should be viewed as a luxury good.

Here is another example – the Bentley automobile. The prices run from $150,000 to $4,500,000. To what degree are such prices (and the corresponding expenditures of labor and materials that are used in producing these cars) justified, when comparison is made with such workaday vehicles as the Toyota Corolla or the Prius, which basically are the equal of the Bentley in terms of quality and comfort, but are several orders cheaper, costing from $12,000 to $25,000? Common sense suggests that in such automobiles, the lion’s share of the labor and materials has been converted into frivolous luxury, into a mere symbol to provide visual demonstration of its owner’s status. Just think for a minute: the labor of a million people and tons of materials are engaged in the production of expensive cars, not to mention the army of people indirectly connected to the business, such as doctors, insurance companies, teachers, children’s agencies, transportation, restaurants, and so forth. All of these efforts ultimately join together to produce as their end product a mere symbol. Not medicine, not things for every day use, not electronics, not food.

Expensive automobiles are merely the tip of the iceberg. Luxury features have penetrated our entire world, entering into different goods in one degree or another. Luxury and prestige cost humanity billions of hours of our labor and our lives, trillions of tons of the most valuable resources. All of that, just to carry out a simple function, that of demonstrating a person’s social importance…

Is it possible to do away with luxury? We believe that it is possible. But first, it is necessary to find an alternative to take its place – a cheaper way for a person to provide visual demonstration of his or her importance.

In the digital age, the best alternative to cumbersome and expensive trinkets (i.e. luxury goods) may be a computer-generated number assigned to a person. This number can become a symbol – capable of replacing all the luxury goods that people now feel obliged to produce, purchase, fill up their space with, and even literally carry on their backs. The creation of such computer programs is possible. Something analogous already exists – the computerized systems used by banks and lenders to determine a person’s creditworthiness. The creation of a similar system to measure social importance is undoubtedly a complicated assignment, but entirely feasible.

A great deal of varied information could go into the determination of this number: the amount of money earned, the level of education, work experience, the number of inventions and innovations, scientific papers, etc. This will make it possible to give a more precise assessment of a person and facilitate the development of qualities useful for society as a whole.

A high number will confer all sorts of advantages on its owner: access to an assortment of different tools (from simple tools and workshops up through research laboratories, institutes, factories and plants, publishers, etc., depending on a person’s education, experience, etc.), certain rights and privileges, as well as respect, prestige, and the corresponding sexual attractiveness.

In the electronic age, would not be difficult to make a person’s number visible and conspicuous to everyone nearby.

An important note: The new value system does not include any coercion. Each person will decide on his own whether he would rather strive to obtain luxury or instead receive an electronically-generated number that could open the gates to new opportunities.

We understand that for many people, such a change in values may seem fantastic, unfeasible, and unworkable. That is understandable. Luxury has been part of our mentality since childhood, as a natural, unshakable, and inalienable part of the world around us. For millennia, indeed for all of human history, luxury has been craved; it has been inseparably tied to success, power, physical protection, and sexual attractiveness. But the permanent attraction of luxury is illusory and relies only on our lack of vision.

As soon as some society or group of people accepts a set of new social rules in which luxury has no place, their worldview instantly changes. Their thinking adapts to the new rules, and things previously implausible turn out to be obvious and natural.

Human nature is extremely flexible. Think of how easily and how quickly children accept the rules of any new game. Or how quickly and naturally people’s thinking adapts to any new conditions, no matter how unlikely. Our rapid adaptability to the environment has been polished for millions of years and is one of the most important qualities that determine our ability to survive to a significant degree.

If there are tangible material and psychological advantages associated with the new values, advantages that improve competitiveness and thus the ability of people to survive, then the new values will rapidly crowd out the old values, automatically modifying our worldviews.

Imagine a world in which the social importance and value of a person are determined extremely simply and cheaply, without the intermediary of high-priced luxury goods. Luxury in such a world will inevitably disappear, freeing up significant resources to be used to intensify of scientific and technological progress and improve people’s lives.

IMPORTANT NOTE

Nothing – explanations, education, obstacles in the form of taxes on luxury goods or additional progressive taxes, coercive means – will ever be able to force people to renounce luxury and endless hoarding, for such methods would merely set up barriers, without changing the tacitly accepted rules of the game which have controlled our world for millennia. Without changing the essence of the value and thus people’s objectives, it would be senseless to call upon people to be reasonable, as people would attempt to simply overcome the new obstacles. Even those who understand the existing problem are obliged at present to bow to the generally-accepted rules of the game. In this case, a luxury for the people, on the contrary, will become even more attractive.

For this reason, people will always search out legal or even illegal means of concealing their incomes: opening off-shore accounts, transferring savings into countries with lower taxes, changing citizenship, acquisition of luxury goods in the names of relatives, etc. In this case, a luxury for the people, on the contrary, will become even more attractive.

To solve the problem requires fundamental changes in people’s worldview. Once we change people’s interests, there will be no need for a progressive tax, luxury tax, or appeals to reason and magnanimity.


PART TWO
SOCIAL PROTECTION

The lack of decent social protection is the basis of such social vices and problems as greed, aggression, stress, and crime.

The existing social programs of the modern world are not able to solve these problems because they are oriented toward helping people on the verge of a physical catastrophe. Assistance programs – government medical insurance for people with low incomes, unemployment benefits for those who have lost their jobs, financial payments to the disabled, and so forth – are all well and good, but can in no way protect the majority of the population from stress, greed, aggression and crime.

An important clarification: This project does not promote any communist utopias. We are talking about formation of a social structure which provides more favorable conditions for people to live and work.

To start with let’s ask the following question. What is the most costly and vital necessity for a modern person’s physical life in this world? We think that the answer is obvious for any person: decent housing. The risk of losing one’s home is the most stress-inducing factor for the average person. It is also the budget item that consumes the most money.

Hence, the fundamental factor in the program of physical protection for people should be taken as the creation of high-quality, but affordable housing.


PART THREE
CONCLUSION

In summary, this project seeks to solve two problems: getting rid of luxury and creating genuine physical protection for people.

This is what the project looks like.

1. Developing special housing that combines minimal expenses with the maximum possible – but objectively reasonable – level of comfort and quality of construction. Here we should stress that we are not talking about cheap housing, but housing combining the optimum amount of comfort and quality and the least possible cost – what we might call “optimal housing.”
2. Developing a special program that would make it possible to rid ourselves, in a natural way (i.e. without the use of coercive force), of luxury as a phenomenon and using the freed-up resources to intensify scientific and technological progress and elevate the well-being of society.

The current task of the project is to create and develop a web site to allow further and deeper development of our theories and to begin the implementation of a technical plan for the practical realization of the project.

PART FOUR
THE STAGES OF REALIZATION OF THE PROJECT

  1. The creation of and development of a web site whose purpose will be:
    • Forming an organization of like-minded people.
    • Improving the theoretical basis of the project through discussion of all its aspects on internal forums, and through the enlistment of professionals in various fields: sociologists, economists, mathematicians, technologists.
  2. The formulation and publication of the basic principles of the project’s theoretical component.
  3. The creation of a technical plan for the practical realization of the project, i.e. a business plan.
  4. The creation of a foundation which would accept contributions.
  5. The practical realization of the project:
  • The construction of an experimental community, including industrial buildings to ensure jobs for the residents. This community would offer its residents certain programs, which would be selected on a voluntary basis.
  • The development and implementation of a system offering an alternative to luxury.
  • The development and implementation of a special banking program aimed at creating efficient economic mechanisms to assure the maximum protection of residents from the loss of their housing.
  • The development and implementation of special programs making it possible to efficiently raise the skills of any professional, and also create the optimal conditions for the real possibility of easily (with minimal expense) changing profession.

IN CONCLUSION:
WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF A NEW TYPE OF SOCIETY?

1.    Civilization will free up considerable resources previously used to produce luxury goods as status symbols.
2.    Instead of the uncontrolled and endless hoarding of money which ends up being turned into symbols of wealth and success, people will have other priorities: inventiveness, science, technology, art, culture, and education.
3.    Resources not used for luxury will be used for scientific and technological progress. This will automatically elevate the well-being of all humanity and the standard of living of all segments of the population, reducing the gulf between the wealthiest and the poorest and helping to increase leisure time.
4.    A change in values and primary objectives will make crime senseless, as money acquired by illegal means will not so easily create a favorable position in society (through the purchase of status symbols). The importance of a person, his or her access to tools and physical protection will be formed, above all, on the basis of socially useful achievements, taking into account only legally earned money and a person’s real merits.

5.    The new values will change people’s worldview, molding a new, more rational, wholesome and thoughtful state of mind. Symbols, conventions, and external forms will lose their previous value, giving way to knowledge and elevating in people’s consciousness the importance of essence rather than form and external appearance. For example, racial and ethnic prejudices will become a thing of the past.