Income tax, however, produces half of the country’s revenue with expenditure or indirect taxation (sales tax, customs duties, car tax etc) producing the other half. We would therefore have to double our expenditure taxes, or tax more things like food and books if income tax were abolished. This, it is argued, would be too regressive, i.e. bear down too heavily on the poorest. However, if the national income scheme were in operation this argument would not be so crucial. The poorest would still pay proportionately more of their income but would be recompensed through their national income cheques.
A doubling of expenditure taxes might, however, be very inflationary since the prices of everything on the retail price index would automatically increase. It would only be seriously inflationary, however, if it were done at a stroke, as Britain did in the first year of Mrs Thatcher’s government. A gradual progressive move towards a zero rate of income tax and doubled expenditure taxes might avoid the inflationary repercussions.
The implications would, again, be interesting:
— Any tax reliefs on, for instance, housing loans or pensions would progressively be reduced to zero, reducing the price of houses and directing more savings elsewhere, perhaps into more productive investments.
– As there would be no further point in people trying to conceal or reduce their apparent income, the workload of accountants and revenue officials would fall dramatically.
– Expenditure taxes as the only form of taxation would mean that you only pay tax when you spend money. Savings would therefore be automatically tax exempt, tempting people to save more.
– All forms of ‘perks’ would lose their rationale as tax-effective ways of paying people, making ‘clean cash’ contracts more sensible.
The switch from income to expenditure taxes will never happen overnight, but it could and should happen gradually. It needs to, because income tax will become progressively harder to collect, with the likely result that, the rate will rise rather than decrease, putting up the cost of salaries in the core and putting even more pressure on organizations to reduce the numbers of core employees. It is a spiral without end. We should deliberately try to go the other way, even if at first it seems perverse.
Part-time professionals
As the world gets more complicated we inevitably acquire more experts, in every field. We have already noted that sixty per cent of new jobs will be professional or managerial. Who will fill them? Technology will not make their jobs any easier but it could make them better. Computer diagnosis in every doctor’s surgery will not remove the doctor but will enable him or her to be a better doctor. It will be the same for lawyers, architects, consultant engineers – for all our experts.
Professionals will be in short supply; professionals will be better equipped, professionals will, quite clearly, be very busy. One suspects that they will be the one group of people who will greatly exceed the 50,000 hour norm for the job. They will need help, particularly with the ancillary areas of counselling, of follow-up, of semi-skilled assistance. Upside-down thinking suggests that we should treat this as an opportunity not as a problem.
Can we not devise more ways to use the intelligence and the experience of people in their Third Age to help in these ancillary areas? As a part of their portfolio it would be of interest to many people in their fifties to have a part-time relationship with a doctor’s practice, with a school, with a solicitor or in a parish. Some of this already happens: there are counsellors in some surgeries, teaching assistants in some primary schools. We will need more of them as the full-time professionals get busier, and they need to be given a more formal status and the necessary training.
It would not necessarily be expensive. Many would do it for free, for the chance of the training and the opportunity to contribute. Others would expect only part-time pay for part-time work. A lot of the time would be spent in adding a human touch to the gadgetry and technology that will increasingly become part of all professional services, and in listening and in explaining – things for which the expert often has neither the time nor the inclination.
Upside-down thinking would like these roles to be properly certificated and licensed, with required training procedures, rather than regarded as ad hoc voluntary help. In this way the public would feel reassured and the helper would feel properly recognized and qualified. It would enrich the portfolio of many a middle-aged person and enrich our society.
There are, to take one example, hundreds if not thousands of churches in communities which can no longer justify a full-time priest. They are now served by one man, or just occasionally now one woman, driving frantically from church to church with not much time for anything else, a visiting religious impresario, not at all the role for which he was trained. There must be many who would be eager, with proper training, to serve as part-time priest to their small community, licensed to that community only, and drawing on the expertise of the full-time priest, in the neighbouring town when it is needed. The concept exists, it is called the non-stipendiary ministry, meaning unpaid, but it is still seen as the assistant ministry. Upside-down thinking would argue that it should be the main ministry, a truly local ministry, served and advised by a small full-time core located in regional centres – the shamrock again.
It is, however, the professional caring services which are going to be overstretched in the new society as people live longer and more on their own. We will need more and better homes for old people, delivery services for them, information and home counselling services, dial-a-meal and dial-a-ride services, perhaps even dial-a-nurse. There will not be enough full-time professionals to man these services. Part-time professionals in their Third Age could be a great help.
Time pay not money pay
If people are plentiful but money is scarce why not pay some people in time rather than money?
It was Stephen Bragg’s idea originally, when he was Chairman of a Health Authority in Britain. Money was short in the health service. Consultants as they get older get progressively more expensive, therefore his Authority could afford fewer of them, getting older, while younger would-be consultants queued up, champing at the bit. Why not, he argued, pay all consultants the same, but require less time from them as they got promoted? They could use that time to work outside the system for money, or inside for no money, or they could use it to go fishing. The Authority would be able to afford more consultants, working the younger ones harder, but retaining the wisdom and expertise of the older ones. It was real upside-down thinking and, predictably, was never taken seriously.
The idea, however, becomes relevant when organizations want to shift people in their core from an energy role to a wisdom role. Expressed conventionally it often feels like demotion. Expressed as time pay in place of money pay it has another ring to it.
It is also a way of making sense of one’s portfolio. Some things are done for money, some for love or goodwill, some for the discretionary time they give you. I write books. They don’t, unfortunately, make much money. I know that but still I do it, partly because that sort of work forces me to set aside large chunks of discretionary time, to pay myself in time not money. Others take care to keep three days a week free of formal commitments, to make sure that they have ‘free time’, paying themselves, deliberately, in time.
One can give people time in other ways – time for education, time for children and a family, time for self-development as well, of course, as time for holidays. People in the core may well value time more than money in their pay packets. It is the sort of upside-down thinking which more organizations will cultivate as they look for ways to keep the best people in their cores.
There is, it seems to me, a real possibility that more and more of the most talented people in society may choose to exchange an executive role for a portfolio life quite early in their careers, preferring more control over their time even if combined with a more perilous financial future, preferring, in other words, to balance money pay with time pay. If that occurred, then our organizations would be
in danger of becoming the reservoirs of the second best – not a good omen for their effectiveness.
Paying people in time rather than money, particularly towards the end of their job-life, would do something to put the curve of lifetime earnings more in line with the lifetime spending curve. It has always seemed odd that people got most money when they needed it least, in their late fifties and sixties, having scraped and scrimped in earlier years to raise a family. In a sensible world earnings would peak in the forties and would then scale down not up, replaced by more of that discretionary time which was so scarce before.
The Upside-Down Game
Upside-down thinking is like brainstorming. It is easy to think of violent objections to every idea. It is easy but unwise. It is unwise because that will stop the idea in its tracks, before it has had a chance to stretch itself, to get nudged into shape and, perhaps, to speak other and better ideas. It is easy to listen to a new idea and say ‘Why?’ It is more exciting to listen and say ‘Why not?’
The ideas in this chapter are not intended to be a carefully worded prospectus for action. They are here to provoke, to suggest that the world does not have to be run as it has traditionally been run. Looking at things upside-down, or back to front, or inside out, is a way of stimulating the imagination, of spurring our creativity in an Age of Unreason when things are not going to go on working as they have been working, whether we like it or not.
It is a game, in a way, but a game with a purpose. If life is changing as fundamentally as I think it is, then creativity in our social order will be of immense importance. The status quo cannot be the way forward, nor will the status quo, slightly amended, be the best way forward. Then the Mancur Olsen argument comes into play, that the social order only changes when war, calamity or revolution upsets the status quo.
The danger of doing nothing is that the underclass (that new alarming word), excluded from the world we are moving into, takes its own initiatives, substituting terrorism for politics and bombs for votes, as their way of turning the world upside-down.
I hope we can find another way. It has been the British and American way to change things by a process of case law, of case law made into the new fashion, and, ultimately, the new social order. It is in a way a form of gradualism. Change so gentle that you do not take alarm. That way the censorship of literature in books or on stage was watered down until it has almost disappeared, that way homosexuality ceased to be a crime, that way divorce became a part of the new society, that way, I hope, smoking will disappear from public places, drunkenness from our roads and violence from our screens.
Ideas become fashion as a way to change. It is slow, but, as I argued in the beginning, ideas can change the world. I would like to see the upside-down game become fashionable in those quarters which affect to control or influence our social order. I would encourage the think-tanks of right and left to think boldly rather than too practically, the parties of opposition to challenge fundamentals not details, academics and teachers to encourage more why’s? and why nots? in their students, rather than what? and how?
A changing world needs new ideas. The more there are the more used we shall get to them. Thinking the unthinkable is a way of getting the wheel of learning moving, in society as much as in individuals. If the upside-down game caught on, we might be on the move. It is because I am convinced that mankind is essentially a learning creature that I am, at heart, an optimist. I see the problems ahead as the necessary triggers for learning, and therefore for changing. I worry only that we won’t worry enough, that like the boiling frog in Chapter 1, we shall continue to adapt ourselves to the changing scene until we boil ourselves alive.
We need more ‘unreasonable people’ who want to change their world not adapt to it, and who want to challenge orthodoxy rather than rationalize away its inconvenient bits. In the end it’s a question of belief. I believe that we are the inheritors of a most interesting creation (however it occurred). It is our responsibility to make it better, not just to survive. I believe that holds true for organizations, who have a duty to do more than survive, for governments and for every individual. We cannot leave it to ‘them’ whoever we think ‘they’ are. In an Age of Unreason leaving it to ‘them’ would be foolhardy.
If, however, it is gradual change rather than violent change which we want, change by case law and by new ideas made fashionable, then it is crucial that those who might be ‘they’ get involved in some of the re-framing and the upside-down thinking. If they do not see change as an opportunity for everyone they will only invite violent change by those excluded.
This book, for that reason, is not about unemployment but about employment, for only those in work can in the end improve the world for those without work. This book, for that same reason, is not addressed to the underclass, whoever they are, or to the undereducated but to those in positions of responsibility and respectability because only they can change things for those outside, if they have a care to.
My concern is that a world where the individual is left even more to his or her own devices, as more of work and life moves outside the institutions of society, could be a world designed for selfishness, and a selfishness which might not always be ‘proper’ in the sense of Chapter 8. Kingman Brewster, once President of Yale, then US Ambassador to Britain, once memorably asked a gathering of the British great and good ‘Who are the trustees of our future?’ There was an embarrassed mumble but no clear response. The question still holds good and my answer is that it has to be all of us, at least all of us who are capable of reading a book like this, and who have a concern for the world our children and our grandchildren will grow up in.
We may not, individually, be able to make their world safer from nuclear war, or to preserve the rain forests better, or to keep the ozone layer intact, but, as I argued at the beginning, it is often the little things of life which matter most, the ways we work and love and play, the ways we relate to people and the manner in which we spend our days as well as our money. These things we can affect. We do not have to accept them as they are. The Age of Unreason is inevitably going to be something of an exploration, but exploring is at the heart of learning, and of changing and of growing. This is what I believe and this is what gives me hope.
Epilogue
The world that our parents knew is not the world we live in today; nor is our world any sure guide to the way our children will live and love and work. We live in an Age of Unreason when we can no longer assume that what worked well once will work well again, when most assumptions can legitimately be challenged.
One thing however is clear: institutions will be less important. More of us will spend more of our lives outside formal organizations. ‘What,’ I said to the Chairmen of some large financial institutions, ‘will your executives and your brokers be doing between the ages of fifty and eighty when, assuredly, they will not be working for you or with you?’ ‘It’s a good question,’ they acknowledged, ‘and one we ought to look at sometime.’ By the time they do many of those 50-year-olds will have moved on and out.
‘I have ever hated all nations, professions and communities, and all my love is towards people,’ said the poet Pope, ‘but principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth.’ He would have been pleased with the way things are going, even with the chance to add a feminine name or two to the catalogue, for this is an age when individual differences will be important, both inside and outside organizations. The successful organization will be built around John and Peter, Mary and Catherine, not around anonymous human resources, while in the world outside the organization there will be no collective lump to hide under. We shall have to stand each behind our own name tag.
It should suit countries like Britain rather well. Condemned for decades for the ineffectiveness of much of her industry, Britain has always been renowned and even celebrated for her journalism, for her television and her theatre, for skills of finance and consultancy, of architecture
and civil engineering, for medicine and surgery, for design and photography and fashion. These are all by-line occupations, meaning that the individual is encouraged to put his or her name to the work. They are all occupations where the organizations are more like a network than a pyramid, where hierarchy is minimal and individual talent of great importance. As more of industry and more of commerce become by-line occupations they will fit more naturally into the individual ethos of Britain and, indeed, of most Americans. The mass organizations of ‘hands’ and ‘resources’ never worked too well in the old democracies of either nation. It will be interesting to see how long they continue to work effectively in the newer democracies of Asia.
A society of individual differences, however, has its problems as well as its undoubted opportunities. Liberty, or the right to be different, and equality have always been the two proud goals of democracy. Unfortunately it has always proved difficult to have both at the same time. If people are encouraged to be different they will not end up equal and if they are to be kept level they will have to have their liberty curtailed; nor is equality of opportunity, normally defined as the right to go to school and hospital, quite the same thing as a full equality. A society founded on individualism could fall apart without the glue of fraternity that the French revolutionists added to liberty and equality; fraternity, or the awareness that there are others who are as important as oneself.
The Paradox Of Choice
People who are free to choose may choose wrongly. This is the age-old paradox. Sin is the other side of freedom’s coin. A world without sin would be a world without choice.
All the forces described in this book seem designed to set the individual free to be more truly himself or herself. Choice is multiple for the fortunate ones. They can choose when to work, at home or in the office: what to eat, with irradiated foods coming fresh from all corners of the world; what to buy via electronic catalogues. They can choose to live richly or thinly in a material sense and even, perhaps, when to die. Within society we may expect the abundance of choice to lead to the erosion of any one dominant set of values. No longer will we see some seeking to set or change the rules while others, the majority, wait to keep the rules they set. ‘Anything (or almost anything) goes’ will be the message of the next decade. It will be increasingly acceptable to do your own thing provided that thing does not interfere with the choices of too many others. NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) has always become the plea or bleat of those who seek, at the same time, to promote individual liberty and to defend their own islands of privacy, words once again heralding a change of tune.
The Age Of Unreason Page 19
