Chapter 7
The Cumulative Nature of Wealth
2WEALTH. The measurable degree of forwardly organized environmental control, in terms of quickly convertible energy, capacities and performance ratioed system capabilities per capita, per diem.
3 Wealth is now without practical limit. All the constituents of wealth are now demonstrably inexhaustible and are all on inventory to man’s immediate willing. Science has hooked up the everyday economic plumbing to the cosmic reservoir.
4 You can now have your cake and eat it. The more you eat, the more and the better the quality of the cakes to be had by further production.
5 Science continually does more with less each time it obsoletes and scraps old inventions. Scrap is resolved to some part of the inventory of the ninety-two regenerative chemical elements. Interim improvement in technical measurement of performance makes possible an ever higher magnitude of new performance by reuse of the same quantity of the original inventory of the chemical elements. Telephone messages per given cross-section of copper wire increased from one to several conversations at the same time, then to scores, then to hundreds of messages taking place concurrently. So rapid is the rate of gain of telephone technology per given amount of copper that the telephone company has an almost inexhaustible mine of copper in its progressively obsolete equipment. The chief engineer of the Bell Telephone Company stated in 1936 that the stocks of copper owned by the telephone company, obtained from scrapping old equipment, would be sufficient for them to expand their service from the United States network to a world network without buying further quantities of new copper. This does not mean that they would always keep the wires. Part of the copper might go into the radio equipment between the long distance centrals.
6 The formula for common wealth production is: Ever greater investment of now unlimited energy in redesigned tools and end product. The energy investments may be in the form of heat treatments, precision tolerances, metallurgical alloying, etc.—always contriving to afford greater tensile strength, finer edge, greater wear, etc.; and the degree of greater performance thus accomplished is always a net increment of common wealth. Because more has been done with less, the balance can go into new degrees of mastery by man of his given environment.
7 Ever greater reinvestments of cumulatively advancing technology. This is the regeneration of intellectual advantage.
8 Result: The provision of higher magnitudes of performance per pound of the ninety-two regenerative chemical elements, and per hour of man’s time, and per unit of energetic expenditure,—ergo, again net increment, of reinvestible performance advantage, i.e., wealth.
9 We could progressively scrap the whole paraphernalia of civilization’s present mechanical equipment, both production and end product, replacing these with improved mechanics and products of fractional dimension as compared to the scrapped mechanics, while netting not only a higher standard of living performance for ourselves, but enough raw materials and improved know-how to expand the physical apparatus of our standard of living to serve not just our U.S.A., seven per cent but half the human family. The advantages gained by the latter would allow them in turn to develop new sources, sum totally providing the new advances of science and industry to serve all the peoples of the world. What to do about war surpluses here and abroad is clearly indicated in these truths. Scrap them one hundred per cent and reprocess the chemical elements into higher and more appropriate use forms, thus generating common world wealth. Spend ingenuity on brand new higher performance products rather than on makeshift application of obsolete gadgets.
10 Materials Equals energy as mass; physicists’ law of conservation states that: energy can neither be created nor lost, ergo, there cannot be realistic energy depletion or debitor fundamental debt. Debt indicates depletion and borrowing from diminishing sources. There is no possibility of absolute debt 1 occurring in the new economics made available through the accomplishments of science. This is because the basic constituents of the wealth can no longer be depleted.
12 Know-how Technology (instrumented and documented intellect) improves with every re-employment because experience is consolidated in increasing degrees of precision, behavior and dimensional data.
13 Power Energy—larger and larger blocks of which, as inherent principles of an inexhaustible universe, become available to man’s control account. The impoundment of ever greater blocks of energy within the arrangements of the ninety-two chemical elements to give higher degrees of performance of structure and mechanics constitutes the actual means of harvesting of universal wealth. It is as though the phenomena which we call raw materials, which are in fact our ninety-two chemical elements, were a fleet of cargo vessels into which we load ever greater cargoes of energy, and as we load them they give higher degrees of controlled performance. As a result, we increase our control over our fate and that is the function of wealth.
14 Faith Inexhaustible faith of man in the validity of himself as an effective factor in the biological equation of the universe, to which latter the principle of essential priority of the commonweal is implicit—that is, that the individual is a product and servant of a plurality (but that his best service to the commonwealth can be indicated only by admonition of the individual intellect, which can best integrate all factors of the creative equations). In the principle of mass production industry, the significance of the individual as a machine of production continually diminishes and his importance as a consumer increases proportionally. The intellectual productive ability of science and technology which displaces the individual as a productive slave is cumulative to the whole history of intellect.
15 Through the new operating requirements of the transcendental industry, society must arrange a debtless system of increasing the availability of industrial services to all individuals and concurrently to an increasing number of their infinite needs in order to satisfy the science-industry-man equation. If not satisfied by creative ends, the forces now involved will be articulated to man’s ultimate destruction because he lacked faith in his own validity—his validity as a never-ending, dynamic process of inclusion and refinement.