"I want to buy some extra copies." -- John O'Connor, Sept/98
"This book is a building block to creating a better work environment." -- Anthony Schinella, online Amazon review
"You've got a good program there." - John Kenneth Galbraith, despite Hyde's breaching of Galbraith's First Commandment, "In economics, one should never be right too soon." -- John Kenneth Galbraith
Product Description
Fearing we are reliving the 1920s and will soon enter another great depression, this book focuses on a forgotten economic theory of the early '30s. This "worktime economics" was so simple and powerful that the whole eclectic New Deal had no integrating theme but to stop it at any cost. But despite its profusion of bandaids, it took the War to give the New Deal the appearance of success. After one chapter of diagnosis and scene setting, nine chapters develop worktime economics into the powerful tool that its great prophet, engineer Arthur Dahlberg, came so close to crafting 66 years ago. It conveys the triumphal challenge, "We're so close - let's get it right this time!"
The general approach prioritizes technology as the supreme factor of our time and poses the question, "With all these robots and computers, why aren't we ALL living in heaven?" The answer seems to be that we are getting something, very basic, wrong. We are taking the work savings of technology as anxious underemployment instead of as financially secure free time. We are falling into Chesterton's pan-utopian trap by failing to define "maximum share," even of work. And if we can't define a maximum share of work, we'll never define a maximum share of money. And if we can't stop moving toward a condition where 1% of the population owns 99% of the wealth - except by war - we will continue to evoke internal (bulging prisons) and external (possibly nuclear) war.
This book proposes defining maximum share in the easiest area, employment or "worktime." It proposes defining it in the least arbitrary and controversial way - by reference to our rising technology levels as manifested in our unemployment, welfare, disability, homelessness and prison rates. It proposes to introduce a flexible solution in a private-sector and then a public-sector stage. And the public-sector stage has five phases that can be applied equally well to balancing personal income and debt in the more distant future when the heightening of public sensitivities and expectations demand further improvement.
The phases lay down a basic pattern of share definition in the work area that can later be applied in the money area. The three middle phases of actual share definition (timesizing) are protected from "leakage" by a first phase that takes charge of internal risks such as conceptual and interest-rate errors, and a last phase to handle external risks such as floods of imports or longer term, over-population due to high immigration or birth rates.
People are always promoting education in hopes that someone will come up with a comprehensive solution to the nation's woes. This is one such solution that we nearly had 65 years ago when a 30-hour workweek bill passed the U.S. Senate but was blocked in the House.
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