00100	SOME ECONOMIC PROPOSITIONS
00200	
00300	
00400		1. In 1973 the U.S. economy is growing very fast as it should.
00500	This produces spot shortages, because the economic servo-mechanism
00600	by which shortages raise prices which raises production operates
00700	with time constants that depend on the technology of the particular
00800	industries, on construction lags, and on the economic situation of
00900	industries related to the given one through the Leontiev matrix.
01000	This can be relieved by good predictions of future demand.
01100	
01200		2. There is a certain parallelism between planning and prediction.
01300	Namely, a good economic plan will make many of the same decisions
01400	that would be made by individual producers if they knew future
01500	demand curves.  There probably are some important discrepancies, however.
01600	
01700		3. There ought to be a social contract that tells the relative
01800	rewards of different occupations.  This contract would be subject to
01900	change by politics and other power struggles but would reduce the amount
02000	of conflict.  This is because economic struggles are needed at present
02100	even to maintain a groups present share of the GNP.  It could be 
02200	accomplished with a universal cost-of-living adjustment to salaries
02300	with a variable deflator to adjust total demand to total supply.
02400	A corresponding regulator on the price side should also exist, but
02500	it should be less rigorous, because of the greater differentiation
02600	of products makes rigid rules difficult to define properly.
02700		4. Perhaps there ought to be futures markets in more
02800	commodities and in labor, i.e. in such a market one would be
02900	able to buy or sell a man-hour of plumbing in 1976.
03000	
03100		5. The stock, commodity, and real estate brokers can be
03200	and should be substantially wiped out by a uniform computerized
03300	property exchange that everyone could join for a $25 initiation
03400	fee and charges for keeping track of transactions.  Workers have
03500	had to worry about technological unemployment for many years.  Now
03600	it is the brokers' turn.
03700	
03800		6. All technological improvements should produce unemployment;
03900	otherwise they aren't worth making.  Full employment is and should
04000	be assured by a general economic servomechanism.  If we understood
04100	this mechanism better, it would work better.  Probably, a first step
04200	is to provide the government with more precise controls than just
04300	controlling the interest rate and money supply.
04400	One candidate is government purchase and sale of other commodities
04500	than agricultural in order to buffer markets.  Of course, there is a lot
04600	of complaint about how this has worked out in agriculture, but perhaps
04700	the troubles stem from political determination of prices paid in
04800	particular years and also because weather fluctuation generates more
04900	instability in agricultural supply than would be affected elsewhere
05000	in the economy.  Perhaps there should be a rigid rule that the
05100	any government stocks would be reduced to a fixed level, e.g. a
05200	six months supply within say three years and would be bought up
05300	to that level in order to have a supply.  This number would be predictable
05400	in general but all these numbers would be moved in parallel in order
05500	to have a gross economic effect.
05600	
05700		5. Suppose some organization introduced the credit as a
05800	pseudo-monetary unit.  A credit consists of a fixed physical
05900	mixture of commodities, e. g. 5 pounds of steel + 2 gallons
06000	of regular gas + 1 bushel of wheat + one haircut in Denver.
06100	They would buy and sell credits at current prices for the
06200	commodities involved.  Some people might find it worthwhile to
06300	make loans in credits and charge interest in credits.  Thus
06400	credits would be an inflation proof currency.  This would cause
06500	a desire to bargain for wages expressed in credits.  I suppose
06600	it's a bad idea.