The GNP, as described in Section 2.3.3, has primarily appeared as a convenient indicator because it is very easy to extract from the kind of data that national statistical bureaus have specialized themselves in collecting. It measures economic activity and includes anything that involves the exchange of money. No questions are asked regarding whether the activity is useful, whether it brings benefits to society or to individuals, or whether it has negative impacts on society or environment. Given this background, it is strange that political leaders have adopted the mantra of referring to growth in GNP as the fundamental goal for their society and for their efforts in governing it, and even stranger that the voters do not question this mantra. Or perhaps it is not so surprising, considering that the political trick employed is to threaten people that without growth they shall lose their jobs and be unable to put food on the table. From this, it may be worthwhile to step a little deeper into the background behind the claimed connection between economic growth and welfare constituents such as being able to live a fulfilling life without lacking basic necessities. The further question of how economic growth might be made compatible with sustainability is occasionally discussed (e.g., Arrow et al., 2012), but really boils down to the obvious statement that growth exploiting any kind of depletable resources is necessarily unsustainable, as is growth using renewable resources above the natural upper limit of regeneration (think of wind or solar energy or biomass). Only growth in nonmaterial categories of economic activity can in principle grow unlimited, independent of whether they contribute to welfare or not.

It should immediately be noted that the politicians preaching about growth or job loss are deliberately acting contrary to the UN Human Right Charter, Article 23 (see Section 2.3.1), according to which it is their mission to ensure that citizens have jobs and get sufficient remuneration to allow a dignified and fulfilling life. This means that growth in activity is not desirable if it cannot be reconciled with arrangements where all citizens can enjoy work and leisure in a way that support the conditions for welfare. Economic growth is an acceptable goal to pursue only if it is consistent with creating conditions that maintain or improve welfare for everyone, not just for a few. The conditions for such welfare certainly include ensuring that wealth distribution is fair and disparity modest. The neo-liberal paradigm of maximizing the disparities between layers of society is not compatible with basic human rights.

As discussed in Section 2.2.1, the hope of neo-liberal advocates is that the poorer strata of society (or of nations) do not notice the increasing disparity if their own situation does not become worse, and if it does (e.g., during the recurrent financial collapses and their toll of job losses), that people should blame themselves rather than the economic system and the political leaders allowing the increases in economic disparity. Creating the notion of (nearly uninterrupted) growth is an important tool in maintaining this illusion. When the growth indicator includes both increases in the production of goods and services, growth in empty financial transactions and pollution, resource depletion and environmental degradation, then the growth will rarely halt and the population can be presented with daily news telling how well the nation is doing. The absent policy measures to ensure a fair distribution of the profits associated with the upward trend of the growth indicator can be played down, or at least so it would seem, due to the advertising campaigns and staged political discussions of petty matters in all media addressing the public, taking all the time and space available so that ‘sorry, we do not have time to discuss distribution issues, because our amateur singing/dancing shows take all our time’ or ‘sorry, we get so many letters from the readers each day that we cannot possibly publish your comment on wealth distribution’. The following sections will discuss how things might change if the GNP growth indicator were replaced with a more relevant indicator of activity.

Growth may be said to be necessary for the poorer inhabitants of the world. More precisely, development is needed and in some cases, it may involve growth in resource use and thus interfere with the ongoing resource usage of richer countries, in case limiting factors are already in sight. This raises a number of questions, including what the sustainable human population of the world is. Of course it is not a constant but depends on the technology available and the efficiency by which it is used. However, the parts of the world that already use many resources inefficiently would likely need negative growth in resource exploitation (but possibly combined with positive growth in technological skills for efficient use of resources) in order to make room for nations lacking basic ingredients of well-being. How this may be achieved is, unfortunately, not a part of the current economic paradigm. United Nation’s organizations such as the World Bank (2006) or UN (2006–2014) study group set goals for development of the poorer parts of the global economy, but rarely address the adjustments necessary in the affluent parts of the world, and seem to shy away from any discussion of population stabilization. It may happen by itself if the poor get rich, but history teaches us that this takes time and that the population levels resulting from such transitions are about an order of magnitude higher than at the starting point, which may not be acceptable in the current situation. Not long ago, a substantial interest in the relation between population size and economic growth was voiced (e.g., Nordhaus and Tobin, 1972).

In closing this section, it seems fair to quote John Galbraith in one of his more sarcastic appraisals of his own profession, ‘In economics, it is professionally better to be associated with highly respectable error than uncertainly established truth’ (Galbraith, 1976).

International organizations have stressed that both resource depletion and environmental damage should somehow be subtracted from the GNP (or, seen as more convenient by the economists mentioned earlier, from the net national product) in what is sometimes denoted a ‘green GNP’. Notably, a group of international organizations have developed a framework for environmental accounting, making it closely resemble the traditional economic accounting by representing land and other durable property through a rental value, as suggested in Section 2.1.1, but at the same time not questioning private ownership of such assets (UN, EU, FAO, IMF, OECD, WB, 2014) and tacitly assigning zero economic value to natural assets not being part of any economic activities. These limitations are the result of wishing to make the environmental–economic accounting framework as similar as possible to the framework for conventional national accounting developed earlier by essentially the same organizations (EC, IMF, OECD, UN, WB, 1993). However, the international organizations closest to actual politics have generally taken the stand that incorporating issues of environmental sustainability in the GNP would be a lot of work, because many of the necessary data are not collected (Stieglitz et al., 2009^*), and therefore they instead suggest, at least for the time being, that indicators for environmental and social impacts be defined and assessed in nonmonetary units and subsequently submitted to political decision makers along with the traditional GNP (e.g., EC, 2013; OECD, 2014; a short summary can be found in Gravgård, 2013).^† This would make sure that the GNP, at least for a while, can continue to be heralded as a goal in political campaigns, while the new indicators perpetually play a secondary role not associated with compulsory political action, and are mainly there just to show the voters that the issues involved have not been forgotten. The difference between activities and welfare is in any case clear from the absence of activities not paid for in the GNP (work in own household and garden, free work for charity and sports organizations, and so on). Not only does this exclude using GNP as a measure of welfare, it also prevents identification of developments changing in time, such as the transfer of care for children and the elderly from the unpaid family sphere to enterprises within the economic web. Quite generally, the activities that people consider as contributing most to welfare are rarely the activities of highest cost, as measured by GNP or any other monetary activity measure. It is therefore in any case necessary first to repair the monetary activity measure to reflect only activities desirable for society (by excluding activities such as polluting or destroying finite resources or moving funds around in circles), and then to discuss the translation of each activity into a measure of the associated welfare, if any.

In contrast to many of the earlier initiatives, which propose to treat environmental changes (in natural resources and induced from pollution) by an overall subtraction from the GNP, the consideration here will be the alternative of proceeding by an item-by-item evaluation, looking at the positive and negative impacts of each activity, not only from a life-cycle perspective but for any extent of time where impacts may happen. This idea grew out of discussions during the 1970s with Swedish aeronautical engineer Olle Ljungström, and may be called a measure of desirable activities (MDA) (Chapter 14 in Sørensen, 2014), because it divides the components of the GNP activities into three general categories: those predominantly desirable to society and its members, those more or less neutral (no benefit but likely also no harm) and finally those that are damaging to environment or society or any of its members. Each component of the GNP would be multiplied by a weight factor that is positive, zero or negative in the three cases, and finally summed up in case one wants a single number to replace the GNP, rather than a detailed account. The weighted sum would clearly be much closer to an indicator of wealth than the GNP summation with unit weight for all activities, even though the precise determination of the weight factors is of course uncertain and sometimes depending on arguments and valuations on which citizens may disagree. In its simplest form, the MDA would use a weight factor of ‘1’ for desirable activities, ‘0’ for neutral activities and ‘−1’ for damaging activities.

In practice, the weighing would be done in a slightly more complex way, because the data used for calculating a country’s GNP are available in terms of input–output matrices, telling how each category of import is distributed to manufacturers and service providers, and then how each step of industrial processing, assembly, conversion and despatch between enterprises is implying payments between companies in a matrix form. Finally, how each good or service is sold to private and public consumers, possibly enlarging the stocks of certain assets, or is exported. The negative social and environmental impacts that affect the monetary value of each transaction or activity chunk may be described as a monetary value to be subtracted from each particular activity represented by a point in the input–output matrix,

where the index ‘j’ denotes production/service sectors and the index ‘k’ denotes output sectors of private or public consumption, stock change or export. The last equality indicates the possibility of writing the impact to subtract at each input–output step as a factor multiplying the GNP contribution by the activity step in question, c_jk. Some of the impacts relate more closely to the production or service-providing phase (sector ‘j’), while others relate more closely to the use and disposal phase (in sector ‘k’), allowing the impact factors to be written as

where e_j and f_k are weight factors applying to each sectors of input or output, so that the overall monetary evaluation of the national activities with consideration of social and environmental impacts becomes

The conventional GNP is obtained by making e_j and f_k equal zero. The translation of MDA into a measure of welfare (although only the components from activity flows, not from property or other stocks of wealth) would require an additional factor w_k for each end-use activity, to be determined, preferably, by direct expression of opinion by the members of society themselves,

The weight factor, w_k, differentiates otherwise positive activities according to how much they benefit society and its individual members, rather than to how much they cost, and expresses an attitude toward the severity of those impacts that have been found to be negative. High welfare contributions may come from activities with small monetary value, as well as from activities without monetary assignment, in which case they would have to be added to the restricted data from the national accounts, as indicated in the formula given earlier. The stocks of wealth may also have to be weighed in accordance with personal preferences, averaged over the population of the society for which the MDA is evaluated.

One may determine all the weights or at least the welfare weights by democratic vote, where each member of society can examine the list of activities (on the Internet, similar activities possibly grouped together in order to limit the overwhelming number of categories used in many current national accounts) and place his or her weight factors e_j, f_k and w_k (using a personal identity code as already required for all communication with government entities in many countries). The average of the weight factors for a particular activity from all those voting would be the one to use in the MDA. Clearly, a particular citizen does not need to put a weight factor on each component of activity, but can restrict the entries to activities for which the voter has views and feel confident putting in a number. Also, this would allow citizens to change their voting at any time if new information or insights induces them to change their ranking of any particular type of activity. The number of votes cast for each activity category, plus average and the standard deviation of voted weight factors for the category, can be publicized as assistance to further voting actions. As with any voting over the Internet,^‡ strict security measures would have to be in place to avoid misuse.

Naturally, an alternative approach would be to have weight factors determined by independent scientists with deep insights in the scientific fields affecting each weight factor assignment. Such an approach, say, with ‘experts’ placed in government committees, or with departmental civil servants instead of independent scientists, would be similar to the way such enquiries are being conducted at present in many countries. This opens the usual discussions of whether ‘official’ experts are free of influence from lobby groups or from the political preferences of the sitting government, just like the use of general referenda or direct democracy via the Internet opens questions of whether citizens have sufficient knowledge to choose the weight factors in question, and whether they can perhaps be manipulated by interest groups to vote in ways not reflecting their own basic interests, by making use of subversive hiding of underlying mechanisms determining the real implications of casting votes in a particular way. More on such kinds of direct democracy follows in Section 3.2.4, as well in the scenario in Chapter 5.

As an example, the monetary quantities needed for determinating the MDA have been calculated for the Danish input–output tables of the 2011 national account, using a quickly created set of subjective weight factors, e_j and f_k, not seriously subjected to scrutiny, in order to illustrate the procedure. Table 3.1 shows the effect of applying the reductions in ‘green activity measures’ derived from resource depletion and environmental and social impacts, but only to the production and service providing sectors, not to the consumption sectors. Tables 3.2 and 3.3 include both impacts on the ‘green activity measure’ arising within the production/service sectors and also those from the consumption sectors and stock changes. In Table 3.2 the effect on private consumption sectors is depicted and in Table 3.3 the effect on public consumption sectors. The Statistics Denmark (2015a) categories used in the input–output matrix divide production and service into 235 categories and consumption into 295 categories. This is far too aggregated to allow a precise determination of the impact numbers to be subtracted. It is not known if the agricultural activities use ecological (organic) cultivation methods or traditional chemical cultivation methods with pesticides, etc. Similarly, the tables do not indicate which producers or service providers use renewable energy rather than fossil or nuclear fuels, and the tables cannot identify producers that use mineral resources in danger of depletion. Some of these data may be found in other statistical bases. For instance, the known penetration of ecological farming in Denmark (Danish Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, 2010; Sørensen, 2012) and the share of renewable energy sources (Statistics Denmark, 2015b) are available and have been considered in the choice of the weight factors shown in Table 3.1. However, in many cases, such as for soil or waterway pollution and the use of rare minerals, the available data is of limited use (for example, statistics on materials use broad categories of physical amounts, while toxicity and emissions have rarely been quantified in more than a few specific case studies). In order to proceed from statistics of physical quantities, the monetizing of health and social effects from emissions have to use available life-cycle studies to quantify impacts (EC, 1995; Sørensen, 2011). Most impacts do not respect borders, in particular, the impacts from greenhouse gas emissions are felt globally, but with differences depending on local climatic and social conditions.

To arrive at the GNP (all weight factors equal to one) or the MDA (including subtractions due to impacts from resource depletion, environmental degradation and negative social impacts), one has to sum all the consumption and stock change sector activities, add the exports and subtract the imports. Using the Danish 2011 national accounts as an example, the value of the exports are 12% above that of the imports, but the MDA difference resulting from the impact corrections is much larger, because for imports, corrections are made both for production and use, but for exports only for production. This is not an error, because the impacts from the use of goods and services exported by Denmark should be incorporated in the green accounts of the countries that import them, and not in the Danish account. A dominating contribution to the Danish CO₂ emissions is from air and particularly ship emissions outside Denmark, due to the country’s large presence in international sea hauling of goods. These emissions are not included in the traditional green accounting, as they primarily relate to exports of transport services.

The reduction from GNP to MDA presented here cannot be compared with the preliminary attempts to establish a green GNP by Statistics Denmark (Gravgård, 2013), because Statistics Denmark only consider a limited devaluing of natural resources similar to that of production machinery, that is with use of a similar positive discount rate, prone to the criticism discussed in Section 2.1. Global climatic impacts are not considered at all. Pollution of soil and waterways is not available in monetary terms, and neither are data for materials depletion (the data on materials maintained by Statistics Denmark only specify masses, with no distinction between gravel and gold). As a consequence, Statistics Denmark finds a modest reduction in GNP from ‘green’ corrections.

Fig. 3.1 shows the conventional GNP for Denmark in fixed prices from 1966 to 2011, along with other quantities derived from the input–output tables of Statistics Denmark (2015a). The GNP grows at a steady rate from 1966 to 1996, then nearly doubles its growth rate to 2006, after which the 2007+ financial crises halts the growth and even exhibits a slight fall in GNP. The year 1996 is the turning point where a deficit in the foreign trade balance is replaced by a surplus, growing after the financial crisis. The consumption behavior shows that it is the private consumption that has stagnated after 2007, whereas public spending grows modestly throughout the 45-year period displayed. Some of the growth after 2006 (e.g., in exports) is accompanied by a decrease in stocks.

In Fig. 3.2, the corresponding behavior of the MDA is shown along with the deductions made by the crude illustrative model of MDA, on the same components as those shown in Fig. 3.1. First it is seen that the MDA grows much more rapidly than the GNP, and even grows after the financial crises. The reason for this is that the negative impacts subtracted to get from GNP to MDA have in a number of cases diminished during the period considered. Around 1960, the Danish agricultural production was based on extensive use of plant pesticides and preventive use of antibiotics on livestock animals. These abuses dropped by more than a factor of four from 1960 to 2010, and furthermore, ecological methods entered Danish agriculture in a major way from around the year 2000 (Sørensen, 2012). An even larger contributor to reducing negative impacts was the radical change of the energy industry, both by replacing coal by natural gas (with about half the greenhouse gas emissions) and by use of renewable energy such as the expansion of on- and off-shore wind power production. Fig. 3.2 shows that the decline in negative impacts from production is reflected in the MDA value of exports. However, as noted, the impacts from usage are not deducted from exports because they must be evaluated in the country importing the goods (or services). Because usage impacts are deducted from imported goods and services; Fig. 3.2 no longer shows an approximate balancing between imports and exports. The private and public sector consumption shows the same trends as the corresponding GNP components, including the fall in private consumption. However, the value of stocks no longer declines after 2007, because the negative impacts associated with the changing stocks are smaller than at previous times. In summary, this small exercise shows that the MDA has the potential for a much better understanding of the real development of a national economy.

The stocks of assets are of four kinds:

In contrast to the World Bank concept of assets (capital) mentioned in Section 2.1.1, no unspecified ‘rest category’ is left as intangible. Those components for which a method of estimation has been identified are included. This comprises all the categories that the World Bank lists as “intangible”.

The available Danish statistics enables an overview of some of the relevant assets, as depicted in Figs 3.3 and 3.4. Fig. 3.3 shows the sum of important produced assets (category 2), along with fossil assets (a depletable resource in category 1) and pension funds (category 4). Also indicated is the balance of financial instruments and two components of the passives: public and private debt. The private debt is one of the largest (per capita) in the world and some studies have expressed worry over the apparent stability of the Danish economy in the light of such debt levels (Schwartzkopff, 2013; Davies et al., 2009). The Danish National Bank has in response explained why the debt is not causing it concern (Andersen et al., 2012), first of all arguing that the pension funds build up by Danish citizens are also among the highest in the world, so that along with the welfare economy of the largely free medical, educational and to some extent social services, Danes do not have much motive not to consume as much as the money lenders will allow them, expecting the pension savings to ensure a satisfactory retirement life. The pension wealth is largely of the insurance type, and since the introduction of the welfare paradigm during the 1930s, it has been shaped by most salaried Danes paying 15% of their income to the pension operator. This has typically been 5% paid by the salaried person plus an additional 10% paid by the employer. This scheme was an important incentive when the system was introduced, because individuals not wanting to part with 5% of their earnings also lost the 10% from the employer. Subsequently, the employer part has of course figured as part of the salary in union–employer negotiations.

The pension funds shown in Fig. 3.3 are the market values of the assets accumulated in the pension enterprises at present, that is stock and bond quotes, plus any other property of the pension enterprises, such as buildings. The very strict legislation regarding permitted pension investments in effect until 2 decades ago have been replaced by less strict rules. As a result, some pension enterprises lost considerable value in 2008–10 when stock values fell. Future pensions will depend on capable management of the pension funds, which may or may not materialize, and the current market value is therefore used here, rather than the predicted stock value with some projected interest earnings to the future start time of pension payments (on average 20–25 years) used by the National Bank in the 2012 paper quoted.

The Danish fossil resources, oil and natural gas from the North Sea, have been declining since their first exploitation around 1980. Because very few are left today and the extraction correspondingly declining, a credible stock curve is constructed based on an assumed depletion by early 2020s, by adding extracted amounts annually, backward to the beginning of the graph in 1994.

The largest assets depicted in Fig. 3.3 are those of produced goods including buildings. The assets valuated are detailed in Fig. 3.4. For the category 2 assets of vehicles, equipment, agricultural livestock, infrastructure such as roads, bridges and airports, the valuation is taken from Statistics Denmark (2015c), based on price at purchase or construction, adjusted by a standard rate of depreciation over an assumed lifetime. Also included, because they appear in the same context in the data sets used, is intellectual property (from the arts to technical patents, all belonging to category 3).

In the case of buildings, the similarly calculated data from Statistics Denmark are not used because this would hide market changes in value such as those seen after the burst of the bubble economy in 2007. It is a surprising fact that Danish houses are bought and sold at prices that do not decline systematically toward the end of life of the structure. Despite the compulsory condition and energy use reports that have to be produced when houses are traded, prices of houses at similar locations but with widely differing ranking are quite similar. In order to take such behavior into account, assessment values from the Danish tax authorities are used. They reflect actual sales prices in each neighborhood and comprise both the building (of any type from dwellings to agricultural, industrial and commercial buildings) and the plot of land on which it stands, thus stretching over categories 1 and 2. Other land resources without buildings are not included. The assessment for taxation purposes takes place biannually (one year for dwellings, the next for other buildings) and aims to provide market prices. Therefore, the effect of the building price bubble’s rise and fall is captured with only a slight delay.

Turning to human capital assets, Fig. 3.5 gives some background information on financial activities aimed to build up such assets, notably health and old age care, education and unemployment compensation, but also general expenses for administration, security, recreation and environmental protection. It is seen that the largest annual cost is for old age care, including help in homes (food delivery, cleaning, gardening, personal care) as well as in institutions (from especially equipped houses and apartments with access to mobile nurses to retirement homes and intensive care units). Next come health expenses for hospitals, specialized clinics and general practice doctors (dental work is strangely not supported except for certain age groups such as school children) and unemployment compensation. For poverty assistance the expenses include not just living expenses, but also aid in paying for dwelling rent or mortgage payments, such that for example a time-limited unemployment period does not force a family to move away from the dwelling they are accustomed to living in. The curve for educational expenses is discontinuous because before 2007, only government expenses are included, not the substantial municipal outlays, particularly for primary schools. The same is true for environmental protection, where the expenses carried by municipalities, for example for securing coastal and forest areas against storm damage or cleaning up after such damage, have not been included.

However, on a more general level of discussion, entities such as the capital health and education assets may not have any strong relation to the expenses spent on activities in these areas, and many of the social ‘repair’ expenses, such as unemployment compensation, do not have any obvious function in building up human capital. First, education will be considered.

Current legislation differs from country to country, but usually includes a codex for sober information before purchase, a declaration of the ingredients of the item sold, and a warranty typically much shorter than the expected product life. A few manufacturers offer better than legally required guarantees, such as 5–10 years for computer hard disks, automobiles and furniture. As regards ‘sober information’, most advertisements leave much to be desired, giving no serious information at all or giving misleading information by focusing on positive properties of the product in question but not mentioning areas where the product falls short of other products serving the same purpose. Certain software companies have tried to avoid the consumer legislation valid in some countries by stating that they do not sell their products but only lease them and therefore are not bound by consumer legislation (because consumer legislation in most countries do not deal with leasing, assumed to be of interest only for arrangements between companies).

From a resource and energy perspective, the current situation also leaves much to be desired. Unnecessary short lifetime of many products, as well as poor design with respect to ease of disassembly for reuse and recycling entails a greater-than-necessary resource and energy usage, forcing consumers to buy several consecutive products for the same purpose over a time period where one decent product would have sufficed. Not designing the products for reuse means that disposal options fall back to incineration, which usually limits recycling to certain metals. A slight concern for the environmental issues would lead to the requirements that customers are fully informed not only about the lifetime of a given product, but also is told where it stands compared with optimal products serving the same purpose. More serious concern would lead to a requirement of specific legislation governing lifetime, resource and energy use by the manufacturer and user, as well as a warranty obligation extending throughout the lifetime of the product under specified conditions of use. Isolated legislation along such lines is in place in some countries, for example for building shell–heat losses of new buildings, and in other countries it is approached by providing an open rating system for voluntary consideration at consumer purchase decisions. In Europe, this has, for example led to several classes of refrigerators no longer being produced because consumers always bought those in the top one or two energy rated classes. For cars, this rating system has led to a clear division of consumers into two groups, with one going for the best energy efficiency cars on the market, while the other group intentionally buys the least efficient vehicles, in order to exhibit their indifference to resource and environmental concerns.

A progressive list of measures for improving the situation would start with expanding the rules for declaring ingredients used in the product. The present full declarations required for food products should be used for all products that may be associated with human intake, such as lotions and other cosmetics applied to human skin and nearly all being internalized by absorption through the skin. The explosive rate of adding chemical substances to products that may consequently be harmful to humans would indicate the advantage of working with a fixed ‘positive list’ of allowed substances having undergone long-term testing. Consumers should also know the expected lifetime and the environmental and energy consumption characteristics of each product before purchase, meaning that all products offered for sale to consumers should have undergone a certified life-cycle analysis.

It would seem that current advertising is a poor way of communicating between sellers and buyers. Instead of praising one product over similar ones, the customers would be much better advised by having access to a searchable database where different offerings for each kind of product can be compared on an objective basis, as regards all the concerns mentioned earlier. Some such databases are already available on the Internet for a number of product groups, but they are commercial and would need certification from an independent overseer, such as a government committee operating in full openness. The manufacturers would of course have to pay a standard fee for having their products included in the database, but this would normally be considerable less than the current advertising costs. As it is not in any society’s interest that people buy products they do not need or flawed products, a general prohibition of all advertising would contribute to heightening the quality of commerce and in consequence the welfare of consumers. An overseeing institution can handle disputes over the correctness of database information offered. Prices may go down as the advertising costs are avoided, and eliminating the dishonest manufacturers and sellers is also a positive move.

The end-of-life handling of products is another area where legislation may be necessary. In Germany a lively debate took place during the 1990s, suggesting that manufacturers reduced the number of components in their products and designed them to be easy to disassemble for reuse or recycling of components, and that manufacturers should be compelled to take the decommissioned product back for reuse/recycling after its service life. Several industrial companies expressed their sympathy with the idea, noting that, for example a car door in the past contained several hundred components, but that a better design would greatly diminish the number of components and make it easier to treat after its service life, particularly for the company that had manufactured the product in the first place. Some industries went along this way, for example by standardizing components so that all cars manufactured by a given company had the same door handles and other components that offered themselves to standardization across model variants. Unfortunately, this debate never went further, indicating that such requirements should rather be made compulsory, so that they impose the same requirements for all manufacturers and thus do not affect competitiveness among industries that know their business.

Legislative requirements of this type should not discourage small manufacturers. This would be avoided if insurance type schemes were available to rescue industries not having an internal economic capacity to absorb occasional mistakes.

Provided that leasing or rental access to consumer products are subjected to the same rules as purchased products, many consumer products (and in particular those of longer lifetimes) could be offered for rental rather than ownership, making it even more natural that the manufacturer assumes the responsibility to ensure the proper functioning of the product through its working life as well as in the disposal phase by taking the product back for proper treatment or disposal. If computer software manufacturers continue to insist that they only lease their products to consumers, it is even more important that the consumer protection legislation is the same for leasing and purchase, so that consumers are not buying deeply flawed software that the manufacturer expects to improve by frequent updates^†† as the consumers identify the flaws.

This would also eliminate the discussions of guarantee periods, because warranties would effectively be for the entire product life. If purchase and change of ownership is the preferred way of handling commerce, the warranty rules will have to be changed in such a way that guarantees against manufacturing flaws prevail throughout the product life, while maintenance and wear during use is accepted by the customer, but on conditions that the need for and extent of these have been clearly communicated before purchase.

Following these simple rules will make significant contributions to improved resource and energy usage and will at most affect the general welfare in a positive fashion. Losers are in principle only businesses purposely wanting to cheat the people who buy their products. However, the suggestions will also affect the current practice of having consumer items manufactured in developing countries with low salaries, claiming that in exchange for a poorer quality and low product lifetime, one helps these countries develop. This is false for two reasons. First of all, intercontinental shipping of consumer products appears feasible only due to the current low cost of oil for (mainly ocean) transport,^‡‡ and secondly, only false advertising can influence consumers to think that buying five successive short-lived products made in an underdeveloped country is cheaper than buying one properly crafted product with the best lifetime possible and thus the smallest resource use, environmental impact and energy use. These remarks do not mean that international assistance cannot help to rapidly develop less developed regions. The requirements are to improve local education and offer initial design assistance from advanced countries, a method that has produced successful results notably in China, but along with other local product manufacture characterized by all the negative lifetime and quality issues mentioned.

In a more concrete way, it is proposed that the time has come to replace ‘work’ by ‘meaningful activities’, or rather to return to it (focusing on those activities of the past that made sense and gave satisfaction, as opposed to slavery). The implication is that anyone should have both an understanding of why a given job has to be performed and an acceptance of being the right person for the job. This means that society should be clearer in defining what has to be done in the interest of common welfare, and that education should be offered to make sure that each citizen can appreciate the job he or she is asked to perform and can do it well. In a way, elements of this attitude to the activities by which we earn our living can be seen in many current societies. Many people perform their work ‘con amore’, being satisfied with what they contribute, not caring too much of how long time it takes to finish the job or if the salary/income is a bit higher or a bit lower than that of the person next door. The problem is that a large portion of current work serves purposes that do not contribute to common welfare.

One possibility is to get rid of the concept of ‘working hours’. The transitions that have taken place in many societies over the recent decades have removed much factory work (that could be further made superfluous by increased use of robot technology, leaving only a few operator and supervision employees, similar to what is seen, e.g., in the electric utility sector). In fact, many jobs need not have the employee come to a particular workplace (with negative implication for transportation energy and time use), but could be performed from where the person happens to be. Some people today oppose ‘home work’ because they say that it blurs the distinction between work and leisure time. But this may well be desirable and something one should work toward, along with redefining work as meaningful activity and eliminating current work types no longer seen as meaningful. There are jobs today that cannot immediately be ‘flexed”, such as those of bus and train drivers, power line maintenance units, hospitals and other medical assistance. However, even some such activities might in the near future become much more flexible: vehicle systems may be (and some already are) driverless with use of techniques such as computerized collision avoidance systems, education need not take place in a classroom but can proceed via telecommunication through phone or computer media. Still, there will be medical and social job functions, plus some management and supervision jobs that need to have personnel available at all times, but the ‘meaningful activity’ paradigm also assumes that everybody understands that there are such needs and are willing to undertake them in a planned combination with leisure and other activities.

In any case, a gradual transition to a society with emphasis on meaningful activities will impose many conditions on the technology and social arrangements that will best facilitate the new structure. Current waste of time and resources on commuting can be largely avoided, as can many sales activities such as shopping, that to a large extent needs no supermarkets or retail shops, but only an optimized system for transportation of goods. Similarly, service jobs are not optimized by the current setup of traveling craftsmen, and building and other construction activities are often made in ways that increase work as well as cost more than needed. If such activities are conducted under a system of fixed price and quality guarantee, for example by creating a public company with optimal cost structure, then free competition from any number of private small or large companies can be accepted without risking ending in permanent high-cost markets such as is often the case now. Evidently, setting up such public/private competition is only one suggestion of how the present inflexibilities of purely private building and repair sectors can be avoided.

After the collapse of the reign of a sequence of tyrants, two men wanted to rule Athens. The initially preferred candidate exiled hundreds of citizens in order to rob them of their property, and a revolt by the city and its council ousted him and recalled the second candidate, Cleisthenes, who in 508–507 bc reorganized the various assemblies and courts in order to make them better reflect the composition of the city’s inhabitants. In particular, the basic constituencies (tribes) were redefined to better reflect common interests and avoid quarrels. Proposing new laws remained the task of the ‘upper house’ council, as under Solon, but the main assembly, not formed by elections but by willingness to appear, convened up to 40 times a year and could pass as well as reject proposed legislation. The lottery was still in use for selecting administrators, but in case of the council partially ceded to elections by the assembly (Aristotle, 328 bc). Cleisthenes may have increased equality before the law, but he also allowed an assembly majority to exile citizens they did not like, with very vague charges.

Solon and Cleisthenes were rulers who wanted to consider the opinions of a wider part of the population, through staged assemblies for the different strata of society. Similar ‘enlightened’ autocrats are known throughout history in all parts of the world. Actually passing concrete power to the Athenian people still lacked an underlying framework (such as a declaration of human rights), and providing the assembly with the direct power to exile enemies is a clear example of the dangers of ill-prepared approaches to rights and duties in a democracy.

The next step in Athens’ development toward a direct democracy was taken under the leadership of Pericles (495–429 bc). He furthered the ongoing process of strengthening the power of the courts over the assembly, and removed much of the remaining power vested with the council, with help from his friend Ephialtes. He had no reservation to using the existing law to have the assembly exile two of his worst political opponent. The ruling ‘office of the strategos’ had 10 elected members of which he was only one. Thus he ruled as long as he was looked up to and things changed toward the end of his life. Pericles’ views are primarily known through a speech he made in the winter 431/430 for the victims of the Peloponnesian War, recorded by the historian Thucydides (431 bc). Pericles expresses the view that Athens is the most advanced democracy of its time, expressing its merits in this way.

 

The part of the speech claiming that Athenians could treat their differences in an urban way does not seem to agree with actual events, such as the exiling manoeuvres and perhaps the fact that the assembly on more than one occasion tried Pericles himself under a variety of accusations and fined him substantial sums. He died in a devastating plague epidemic, and left an Athens subject to increasingly errant governance (Aristotle, 328 bc).

The dominating role of the assembly increasingly took the form of mob rule. A failed assault on Sicily and new attacks from another city state, Sparta, added to destabilization. In 406 bc 10 generals (including Pericles’ son) managed to save Athens and its grain import by winning the naval battle at Arginusae. However, on return they were sentenced to death and executed by the assembly, on a charge of not having picked up survivors in the water. The assembly was here in violation of three provisions of the constitution: the judging was made by the assembly without involving the courts, the generals were sentenced collectively and not individually as required by the constitution and the accused were not allowed to defend themselves. Furthermore, attempts by citizens to use their right to question the decision of the assembly were rejected with threats of death penalty. A similar death sentence by the assembly befell the philosopher Socrates in 399 bc (Lewis, 2011).

These events had a profound influence on the philosopher Plato’s view on the Athenian democracy. Plato (c.424–347 bc) saw democracy as the worst kind of governance, which could only lead to collapse and take-over by a tyrant (dictator). Instead, he suggested that governments should be led by philosophers (such as himself), and that the administrators (guardians) of the state were free to lie and break the law as long as it benefitted the state (current politicians would have loved him!). On the other hand, they should not own personal property and they should live in forced marriages and have their children removed to some remote countryside (an idea later reused by Mao in China). The general population exists only to serve the state. He uses an elegant, albeit increasingly monotonous, literary style, in which he puts his words in the mouth of the late Socrates and his friends, assembling regularly to get drunk and discuss politics (Plato, 380 bc, 345 bc; Hansen, 2013a).

After the massive failures of Athens, militarily and constitutionally, the democracy is revived in a milder form by introducing a number of restrictions, notably restoring the role of the judiciary system and giving the council a little more to say (Hansen, 1999). Also around 400 bc, the assembly attendance is rewarded by a pay, like the one Pericles had introduced earlier (about 450 bc) for jurors, administrators and council members. The public service payment was financed, first by voluntary contributions from wealthy citizens, and later by taxing all persons possessing wealth. This created an income redistribution contributing positively to furthering equality in the city state (Lyttkens, 1994,  2010).

Plato’s pupil Aristotle (384–322 bc) observed the 3rd century bc adaptation process of Athenian democracy and, in contrast to his teacher, concluded that democracy could be made to work and in that case would be one of the best choices of constitution, at least for the city state that was his prime interest. He does not exclude the possibility of gaining stability by mixing oligarchy and democracy, and like Plato he finds it necessary that children receive a uniform public education, rather than being influenced by their parents. To define ‘best choice’, he used a measuring stick of welfare, which he denoted ‘happiness’ (Aristotle, 326 bc; Hansen, 2013b). Aristotle was not only a philosopher but also a broadly oriented interdisciplinary scientist, making contributions to several different fields. As a general comment to Aristotle’s Politics and the Athenian constitutions, Rubin (2001) notes that Aristotle is very clear on stating that electing rulers and legislators by lottery and limiting the time a person can sit in office is democracy, but representative elections by vote is oligarchy. The city state Sparta (in perpetual conflict with Athens), where all offices are filled by election is thus an oligarchy, despite its egalitarian law that all citizens should wear similar clothes and eat the same food, and so would any present nation be, despite our flirting with the name democracy.

After the Athenian democracy is nullified following another military defeat in 322 bc, not much was heard about democracy until the 13th century, and even then only sporadically, in connection with minor autonomous areas in Europe. An exception is the Roman writer Cicero’s reiteration of the constitutional questions raised by Plato and Aristotle. Cicero (54 bc) comes out in preference of monarchy but is willing to accept some features of other governance forms. The actual constitutional basis of the Roman Republic was first a kind of direct democracy (by popular assemblies and more restricted councils), which elected magistrates running the passing of legislation, the courts and the military activities. Later, the imperial Rome was ruled by dictators conferring with various representative bodies (Wikipedia, 2015c). The ‘things’ of the North European Viking period around 900 were probably no more than councils in which the leader conferred with or was elected by important landowners and warlords (Sørensen, 2011). William of Moerbeke’s translation to Latin of Aristotle’s Politics appeared around 1260 (Bolgar, 1958) and in 1291, the three autonomous Swiss regions (cantons) Schwyz, Unterwalden and Uri instituted a federation with elements of direct democracy, which later developed into the present Swiss Federation. Already before signing the 1291 treaty, the three forest states had instituted community management of forests, pastures and livestock herds, based on frequent assemblies (Landsgemeinde) of all interested male inhabitants, agreeing on actions on these issues by simple majority vote. This might be interpreted as bringing out the suitability of direct democracy for smaller communities such as cities or here individual, modest-size regions. Already the federation-forming treaty of the three Swiss regions was decided not by direct democracy but by representatives elected by the three individual assemblies (Elazar, 1993).

Over the following centuries, several city states appeared in Europe (such as Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and Liechtenstein), with Republican-style government and various degrees of direct democracy. One feature was the introduction of a legal system with judges elected by the assemblies, and charging these with an arbitration role in case of conflicts with other regions or states, and with functioning as courts for criminal charges within the region. The Swiss cantons were during the Renaissance period challenged by the Church, and later by Napoleon during his imperialistic adventures, but the federal structure as well as many of the local direct democracy traditions has, in fact, been preserved to the present.

Elazar (1993) described the difference between Swiss democracy and, for example US democracy by noting that in Switzerland, individual freedom is promoted inside the liberty frame provided by the community, not outside and not above it. Community democracy requires citizens to contribute to the community and to show tolerance toward others, including minorities, rather than worshipping individualism as the highest goal. One should remember that the success of South European city states in general during the medieval period was due to the difficulty of maintaining central control over large areas by the kings and other rulers following but much less organized than those of the Roman Empire. Most of these city states, such as the Italian cities of, for example Venice, Turin and Florence, had oligarchic or dictatorial rulers, although considerations of trade and commerce created powerful interest groups that sometimes were able to force a political debate. Further North, in Germany, the Lowlands and Scandinavia, cities were less important, but a similar fight emerged between local landlords and kings trying to establish larger territorial states, neither being keen on democratic participation in governance. In several countries, the kings involved the Roman Catholic Church in an attempt to exert a comprehensive mind control over the populations (Downing, 1989; Sørensen, 2012).

Town meetings in New England had some similarity to European city assemblies. In 1628 the British king authorized private companies such as the Massachusetts Bay Company to run the local government including courts and law making (Zimmerman, 1999, Chapter 2). Town meetings were at first spontaneous and without any formal basis, but attendance soon became compulsory and before the end of the 17th century, most town matters were indeed decided at these meetings. In 1634, the General Court imposed on any male above 20 years of age living in the colony, that an oath be taken that he and his family would be obedient to the magistrate and obey any law enacted, and promise to report others who broke the laws, as codified in the 1636 Pilgrim Code of Law (Lutz, 1998, Chapter 20). Each state passed a similar code of law, often with constitutional statements of human rights, such as in the 1639 Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the 1650 Connecticut Code of Law and the 1647 Rhode Island Acts and Orders (Chapters 52 and 39 in Lutz, 1998), but these were all aimed at securing law and order in the British crown colony and did not set rules for democratic activity, although the documents themselves were agreed at meetings and often after general voting. Human rights and liberties had been covered in documents such as the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties (Chapter 22 in Lutz, 1998), partly based on the English Magna Carta (Anonymous, 1215), an unsuccessful attempt to set some basic rules for an armistice. These human rights and constitution precursor documents were heavily influenced by the church, which in the New England case meant by the puritan protestant persuasion. ‘Puritans’ was the common name given to a variety of church groups in Britain who fought against the autocracy of the king and wanted to constrain him from engaging in arbitrary wars, while establishing an level of moral-based personal freedom and liberty for the citizens (the debate is preserved in the Putney debates from 1647, see Clarke and Woodhouse, 1938; further discussion of their New England impact on the democracy debates may be found in Zimmerman, 1999; Chapters 3–8).

The ‘modern’ type of democracy originates from debates during the period of Enlightenment and gets implemented as a constitution by the French Revolution in 1791 and the founding US constitution, drafted in 1787 and coming into effect over the next couple of years. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin visited France and participated in formulating the French Rights of Man declaration (Anonymous, 1789), which like the US Bill of Rights form the basis for the constitution text itself. This is the first time that a constitution is directly formed as a superstructure on a declaration of human rights, and at least in this sense does precisely what the Greek constitutions had failed to do. The modern version of democracy is representative and has no relation to the classical Greek form of direct democracy, and in contrast to the city democracies mentioned earlier was not similar to or influenced by the Greek experiences (Rubin, 2001; Markoff, 1999). Not all British were against the independence and republic formation in colonies such as America. Thomas Paine (1776) noted the absurdity of kings and hereditary succession as a prelude to his call to stop British barbarity and let the United States be free. An exhaustive and sober account of the US society and its political structure in the 1830s has been provided by an envoy of the French government, Alexis Tocqueville (1835, 1840).

The contents of the French and US constitutions are quite similar,^††† except for a few amendments seen as required due to the particular situation of the United States after the Civil War, for instance allowing soldiers to keep their weapons and act as police in the western states, where no regular police force could be formed immediately. At least some of these amendments were supposed to be deleted later, and it is a gross misinterpretation of the permission for ex-soldiers to act as police, when conservative Americans currently claim that the constitution allows every man to bear firearms and use them, as it now happens down to elementary school quarrels. The ‘right’ to defend one’s property with firearms is rooted in Locke (1689), who advocated (in contrast to Proudhon, see Section 2.1.1) that man should have full freedom to do as he pleased with any part of his property, whether physical or intellectual, including use of any means to defend it against intruders.

The intellectual debate on human rights and constitutions was initiated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), along with his work in literature and music. In his analysis of inequality (Rousseau, 1755), he asserts that man shall be loyal only to the entire common good, meaning the welfare of the total society, rather than some monarch or oligarch. He also expresses his antiwar sentiment and disdain for private property, an issue that he follows up in his main political opus entitled The Social Contract (Rousseau, 1762). The contract binds man to serve other members of society in solidarity, and rejects the idea that each man has some ‘natural rights’, such as for the land he is able to be the first to lay hands upon. Rousseau’s concept of a constitution distinguishes between laws, which he believes should be suggested and passed by direct democracy, and their administration by governments and courts, which should be populated by civil servants, hired or elected for their skills and knowledge. His treatise is not suggesting concrete paragraphs of constitutions, but keep the discussion on the level of principles, however not avoiding strong statements such as ‘Representative democracy is one day of democracy followed by four years where the people are nothing but slaves’. Voltaire (1694–1778) criticized the inequality essay and called Rousseau a romantic ‘back-to-nature’ freak, favoring inarticulate and fighting mobs over proper government (e.g., in Candide; Voltaire, 1759), which might have been fair criticism had it been directed at Rousseau‘s early literary works and not the political works described here, where the responsibility toward the entire society is based on articulated demands and not uninformed quarrel. The attack on those preferring life to be as simple and as close to pristine nature as possible should rather have been directed at the American writer Thoreau (1754).

Away from Paris (notable in the direction toward the Pyrenees), there was always a tendency to emphasize ‘freedom’, interpreted both as freedom from the centralized administration and as personal freedom. ‘Equality’ had primarily been associated with equal treatment before the law and in court actions, while equal access to, say, public office was considered negotiable, due to the different qualifications of people seeking such jobs. ‘Brotherhood’ was sometimes even omitted,^‡‡‡ but if it was there, it could mean consideration for society at large, a desire to optimize common welfare or just try to avoid conflicts between groups and fractions. The French Revolution is primarily remembered for its atrocious use of the guillotine. The 1791 ‘revolution’ almost immediately decayed into mob rule, used by people like Danton and Robespierre to execute their personal enemies (not unlike the Greek situation after Pericles’ death). Despite these circumstances of creation, the Declaration of Human Rights and the constitution based on it became the foundation for nearly all implementations of democracy during the following years and decades, and the ‘Rights of Man’ particularly became the point of departure for the 1948 UN declaration discussed in Section 2.3.1. The original declaration read as follows in English translation (Anonymous, 1789):

Neither equality nor brotherhood is explicitly mentioned in this declaration. It is seen that the basic human rights (Article 2) are taken to include property ownership, as further expanded in Article 17. The concept of ‘sovereignty’ introduced in Article 3 and accorded uniquely to the state is here the monopoly on the use of violence. Later interpretations associate sovereignty with how to divide tasks between individual states and a federation or union, for example in the cases of the USA or the European Union. Article 5 limits the permitted laws to exclude arbitrary law making (a fine reminder to current politicians), and Article 6 gives the people the sole right to pass laws, whether by direct or indirect voting. Articles 7–9 provide the protection of the citizens in legal matters such as arrest and trial and Articles 10–11 ensure the freedom of speech.

Duties are introduced in the following Articles 12–14, noting the possible need for military service and taxation (or other ways in which citizens can contribute to maintaining their society). Article 13 suggests a fixed taxation rate for all. Article 15 requires accountability from civil servants and governments and Article 17 ensures that private property can be expropriated by the state if common causes are thereby furthered. The declaration is the first to make up with the earlier definitions of human rights as selfish privileges that can be enjoyed without giving anything in return. Here living in a society is seen as providing benefits conditioned on fulfilling certain obligations, without which there would be no society but just a bunch of individuals trying to maximize their own well being. Emphasizing the coupling between rights and duties is as important today as during the modern democracy formation years, especially after the appearance of the neo-liberal economic paradigm that puts personal gain above anything else.

From a contemporary point of view, there are several of the human rights and duties concepts that appear to need further qualifications. The freedom of speech article was formulated at a time with censorship on written and spoken communication. Although the concerns over such quenching of criticism are still valid, a major problem today is rather junk information and the perversity of advertising, aimed at hiding the inferiority of certain products rather than at making purchasing decisions easier, and also the kind of advertising used in political campaigns to deceive voters to put their cross in favor of politicians who may not be the least interested in the needs of the citizens, but only in securing their own livelihood. Thus, a modern formulation of the freedom of expression should subject commercial messages to strict ethical conditions, making dissemination of false or misleading information a criminal offence. One method could be the use of obligatory labelling (contents, method of production, energy consumption, environmental emissions, etc.), to be required as part of any address to the public concerning a product, along with an objective description of the usage of the product. A radical version of this could be to forbid advertising entirely and only allow a public web description of competing products, as discussed in Section 3.1.4. The same objectivity and completeness condition could be imposed on political advertisement.

The French declaration misses a precise description of equality. For example, equal opportunities are possible only if personal inheritance is abolished, and further require equal access to education and health provision, which de facto means free access, because equal opportunities do not remove inequality in society. The other missing requirement is the establishment of a brotherhood, which in practice will imply a need to emphasize the solidarity, without which the right to hold different opinions and beliefs cannot be secured. Thus, the banner tripartition might take the form conditional liberty, increased economic equality, and first of all a deep-felt social solidarity.

In the present context, free education should be specified as lifelong, continued education, because this is the requirement that our current technology and knowledge stage sets in order for it to function. The duty part of the French declaration should be generalized to require everyone to contribute to the common good according to ability and not just by paying a tax. This has been the requirement of recently proposed constitutions (Sørensen, 2012, Chapter 12) and will receive a more detailed exposition in Chapter 5.

In recent decades, globalization has been worshipped (as requested by multinational industries) and supranational structures such as the European Union have moved decisions further away from the local communities. As a result, most Europeans do not have the surplus to even check what is going on in the distant European parliament and administration. In any case, the EU construction (originally a trade organization) neglects the most basic conditions of democracy, that laws are proposed and passed by an elected parliament before being carried out by the administration. In the European Union, the civil servants (called the Commission) propose laws, and the parliament just has to accord a lump sum annual budget for the Commission. A further Council of Ministers allows representatives from the governments of the member states to vote on the laws and regulations proposed by the Commission (EU, 2015). If the EU project has alienated the population from the political process, the US federation has done much better in making the inhabitants of each state have an interest in what goes on in the federal government. This shows that it is not the size of a supranational structure that determines its success, but the way the construction is made.

If the globalization paradigm is followed, in contrast to aiming for little-interacting regions, the problem of global equity becomes acute. The state of affairs in this respect is miserable (Ward, 1979) and more global trade can only make it worse. One issue hinted at in Section 3.1 is that environmental costs of production and overseas transportation are not considered, due to the World Trade Union’s imposed ‘rules of trade’, but the basic problem is of course the underlying belief that one can always find or create regions with low salaries, where the goods enjoyed by the rich regions can be produced at minimal cost. This is similar to the thinking of the colonial times, that one could always find ‘new worlds’ with land and resources that could be exploited in favor of the rich, neglecting any indigenous population that might already inhabit such regions.

Several political observers have called for a worldwide supranational structure, a ‘World Government’ with more comprehensive charges than the help in avoiding warfare between individual nations that lies behind previous or existing organizations such as The League of Nations and The United Nations. The United Nations has a structure with a large assembly where each country has one vote independent of size, plus an executive Security Council (because ensuring global peace is the primary task of the organization), where the countries with the largest weapons arsenals sit permanently and a few other countries in rotation (UN, 2015).^**** All offices and organizations in the United Nations are financed by voluntary contributions from member states. Accusations of nepotism (employing the brother of some African dictator, etc.) have been made and decisions unfavorable to large countries have been avoided by threats of withdrawing funding. In any case, the United Nations has not fulfilled its objective, as many wars have erupted since World War II, and several of the Security Council nations have themselves started wars of aggression against other nations, despite not getting a UN endorsement that punishing the nation in question was justified.

Nations are a relatively new invention. They appear at different periods in time, depending on where one looks, but in Europe, they were primarily formed during the first millennium, by intricate and sometimes bloody fights typically involving a self-declared king and the local clan leaders possessing the power earlier. Apart from pleasing multinational companies, the extrapolation to make the planet one global super-state has been claimed to be a way of reducing the frequency of wars. In the current epoch, war is primarily encouraged by the arms industry, and it would seem evident that war will not go away unless arms are first removed. Arms reduction requires that security be maintained in other, nonviolent ways, which would certainly clash against paradigms of unrestricted trade of any merchandise, territorial imperialism and the pride that political leaders feel in seeing army parades and feeling superior to each other. Constitutions such as the French revolutionary one clearly identifies the need to give a monopoly of violence to the top level (in that case the state) and nobody below it, and the natural extrapolation would therefore be that only a supranational entity such as the United Nations may possess arms and use them, not the individual member nations. This idea is clearly behind the UN construction, although it is far from implemented. The Security Council can decide that a military action against a national despot bothering other nations is needed (but at present has no jurisdiction inside a nation). However, the United Nations has no standing army so certain member states must pledge to supply the forces. As mentioned the problem is that these existing national forces are also used for wars outside the consent of the United Nations, and that the arms-dealing industry is supplying arms to just about anyone willing to pay for it, from nations down to rebel groups of any kind. What is needed is to enforce the restriction of military power to the highest level of world government, and to forbid anyone below that level to carry arms, which of course needs an ordered transition period before it is possible. Terrorist groups and weapons-based states (including nuclear powers) must first be barred from acquiring weapons from any source, that is a comprehensive ban on weapons trade, between or inside nations, and the existing weapons must be destroyed, forcefully if needed.

Only after the problem of violence has been solved, can one hope to make the World Government a viable institution for regulating trade, environmental impacts and resource utilization, as a road to creating or maintaining human welfare across the planet.

There is an evident alternative to creating a World Government, namely to divide the world into regions that may choose different economic and social organization, use different schemes of government and accept different ambitions regarding technological development. However, this can work only if globalization is suppressed because otherwise economic predators will make use of the differences to further their own interests (use cheap labor abroad, hijack resources, export poor products to other regions, etc.). Such an Earth in separate pieces has worked for millions of years, before the exploits of colonization and international trade, and even up until today, many abuses of trade have been avoided by the system of duties and import regulations aimed at preventing destruction of indigenous industry by multinationals. Also current mass tourism is a two-sided coin: on one side, it is beneficial that people visit people in other places in order to remove prejudices and appreciate the common aspects of human culture, but on the other side, such visits have created artificial demands for things that cannot sustainably become global. Each inhabitant of India or China cannot have a $100,000 gas-guzzling car; so responsible globalization would require currently affluent countries to dispense with such displays of contempt for resources and environment.

An early discussion of democracy based on elected representatives was made by the prolific scientist Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). He departs from human rights such as individual freedom and natural equality but concludes that the best governance is by an absolute sovereign. Yet he sees the need for an input from civil society and concludes that the sovereign must have the consent of the people through a representative structure in what he sees as a social contract (being the first to use this concept; Hobbes, 1651). Disagreeing on the need for an autocratic monarch but supporting representative democracy, the prolific English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) notes that many citizens in his time are fed up with the behavior of their government, and he advocates as a remedy more dialogue between citizens and their rulers as a way to approach his ideas of the greatest happiness for all (utilitarianism) and of individual liberty balanced by the needs of a market-based society. Yet, he was open to guild or cooperative ownership of businesses (economic democracy), and he thought that unlimited growth was incompatible with environmental concerns (Mill, 1861; Wikipedia, 2015d).

The discussions over the century following Mill’s treatise make one thing clear: it is a fundamental condition for a representative democracy to work that it is not the same people who make the laws and administer them. A further idea voiced but rarely followed is that citizens elected to sit in a representative assembly should have fixed terms and strict rules for re-election. In ancient Greece service was for one year with the possibility of one re-election. The precise length of time is less important than to make the firm statement that being a politician is not a bread and butter profession. All experience tells that even good politicians fall into routine if not corruption, if they are allowed to regard the parliamentary job as their source of livelihood.

Some countries have the phrase in their constitutions that once elected to the parliament only the member’s own conscience should guide his or her voting. This is probably fair but removes the representative function. The members of parliament no longer need to promote the matters their constituency elected them for. The situation is worse if the parliament is based on political parties, as most parties require their delegates to vote as the party leader or prime minister dictates, independent of any private ‘conscience’. In fact, this is connected with the introduction of cabinet responsibility, meaning that a government should always be backed by a majority in parliament. This requirement was added to the constitution in several countries, after bad examples of governments ruling by ‘provisional laws’ not supported by parliament.^†††† In any case, all these issues point in the direction of criticizing representative democracy for having weakened or eliminated the influence of citizens on government. This, of course, becomes worse if new or altered legislation is no longer originating within the parliament, but imposed by the government or a president/king, acting (as in the EU case mentioned earlier) both as law-giver and law-executer, in violation of the division between the law-giving, the executive and the judiciary institution or branch. This tripartite system was hinted at by Aristotle, used in the Roman Republic and later England, and named by the conservative French political philosopher Montesquieu (1748). Today it is nearly universally in use.

Why there is in the classical works on tripartite governance as well as in some current nations a king or president above the three branches is not clear. It complicates governance because there now is a novel need to divide power between the hereditary or elected top figure and the branches of legislators and of a practicing government and its civil servant helpers. In some countries, the sovereign has nearly zero power, whereas in others, he/she can influence the executive government and suggest legislation in competition with the parliament (or neglect it and rule by decree or provisional law). Perhaps the invitation to duplicate power is meant to help avoid misuse of the system for corrupt or externally lobby-imposed purposes. The sovereign is in some countries (such as the United States) head of the executive government with certain rights to veto parliamentary decisions, while in other countries, the sovereign is only signing the employment contracts for the head of government and her/his ministers/secretaries.

The whole question of how to avoid possible misuse of positions in the tripartite structure is difficult to address and have given rise to different precautions. In addition to interpreting the laws passed by parliament, the juridical branch in some countries can question whether laws and executive decisions are in conflict with the constitution, and can handle cases of impeachment charges against elected leaders including the president (in republican states). In other national constitutions, an overseer (ombudsman) outside the government has the right to bring charges against government members for misconduct, but the power to oust the culprits remains with the parliament or the Supreme Court. The overseer is functioning for a fixed number of years and is usually a professor of law with a spotless record. Bias may be introduced by the fact that Supreme Court judges and overseers (where relevant) are usually appointed by the head of government that happens to be in office when a new person in the job is needed. This in itself can be misused, for example in cases where by chance a majority of judges die or retire when a particular party is in power.

It has been seen with increasing frequency that nations introduce or use existing provisions for staging public referenda in cases, where far-reaching decisions have to be made, such as yielding sovereignty to international organizations. This, among other things, makes it less likely that the decisions are reversed next time the majority in parliament changes colour. Usually, making changes in the constitution is required to involve a qualified majority (such as 2/3), being passed by two consecutive elected parliaments, or by parliament and by public referendum.

The current party or party coalition-based executive governments are as already mentioned in Section 2.3.2 at variance with several of the conditions for a representative democracy to function (Mair, 2008). They frequently introduce new legislation based on yesterday’s media coverage and often on minor or specific issues that should have been left to the judiciary branch or the executive departments based on existing legislation of a more general nature. However, also the judiciary branch often has problems, usually in the form of yearlong periods for handling cases where the outcome is needed more or less instantly. A standing advisory legal body could help the administration in such cases, but the practice is rather to form committees that take years to come out with a simple report (leaving additional options for shelving cases inconvenient for a given government).

A common form of corruption in representative assemblies and party-based executive government is to allow lobbies direct access to decision makers. In certain types of governance setup it is even required that so-called stakeholders get preferred access to the legislative process. In Brussels, a whole section of town surrounding the EU Commission’s quarters is devoted to industry and special interest lobbyists. But stakeholder involvement is not democracy, as noted by Blinder (1997). In recent times, the debate has continued to reveal weaknesses of the representative political system. As mentioned in Section 2.3.2, Katz (1987) identified the need to replace at least the highest-ranking civil servants when governments change. This is done in the United States, while in Europe, civil servants are in lifelong tenured positions (perhaps motivated by the need to run the country during collapse, such as in Germany at the World War II defeat). Katz and Mair supplemented each other in presenting arguments showing that party-based democracy has failed and should be abolished (Katz, 2001, 2014; Mair, 2008, 2013; Katz and Mair, 2009; Rahat et al., 2008). A similar conclusion was reached by Zakaria (2003) in his treatise on populist and delegated democracy.

Various adjustments to the way democracy is currently practiced have appeared. Bessette (1980) and Fishkin and Laslett (2003) suggest that voting should be accompanied by a deliberation phase, where issues are discussed by professionals and citizens. This appears to be little more than suggesting that voters should be knowledgeable about what they are voting on. The German sociologist Habermas (1962,  1981) criticized, like many others, the representative democracy for marginalizing input from the public sphere, through commercial and mass media manipulation of public opinion, and subsequently expressed the hope that the deliberative democracy idea can revive public participation, influenced by Max Weber’s thoughts on sociology and the Bessette article. A more elaborated proposal is the ‘Inclusive Democracy’ idea of Fotopoulos (1997), combining direct democracy and economic democracy (leaving political decisions as well as production to the ‘people’, the latter as proposed by Mill) and ensuring that basic needs are satisfied for everyone (not exactly copying Russell’s idea, but involving a contribution of forced work, presumably only from those capable of it, in contrast to the many other suggestions of a basic income, cf. Chapter 5), while leaving a free choice of doing additional work to secure nonessential consumer goods. It is acknowledged that people should somehow be given the necessary insights, including ecological ones, if the extended decision making by ordinary citizens is to work (Arapoglou et al., 2004).

New electronic options could lead to better ideas for balancing direct and representative democracy. Article 11.4 of the EU 2009 treaty (Lisbon Treaty) contains a possibility called a citizen initiative. It allows more than one million European citizens (with some further conditions on national distribution) to submit a proposal to the European Commission, which then, if it finds the proposal suitable, may submit it to the European Parliament and the Council. The idea was to allow Internet debate and solicitation by participants from the entire European Union. Upon implementation in 2012, a number of additional conditions were added, on the number of participants in each of seven member countries, on the kinds of suggestions that would be considered, and on a cumbersome national procedure for collecting participant endorsements, excluding Internet use across the entire European Union, and further prescribing a lengthy verification process by the Commission (Carp, 2014). Carp notes the large number of proposals actually submitted, of which none seem to have been accepted, and lists a number of initiatives refused by the Commission, demonstrating that each refusal involved a political standpoint taken by the Commission’s civil servants. This initiative seems to use ‘e-democracy’ to please only those European citizens who have no intention to try it out. The more obvious step of allowing EU-wide referenda, by Internet or otherwise, has already been rejected at a European Convention. The Lisbon Treaty states that the European Union is based solely on representative democracy, although, as mentioned earlier, the actual EU construction is in basic conflict with most definitions of democracy.

Clearly, this negative example does not preclude that e-democracy can be used in the future. The claim is of course, that while early cases of direct democracy was limited to a city or a small number of people, then Internet usage may extend the possibilities to much larger societies, who can interact to conduct the informed debate on issues before voting upon them, even if they are physically far from each other.

In summary, neither direct nor representative democracy will function unless the citizens master sufficient knowledge to be able to understand the issues voted on and are able to ignore noise from special interests trying to influence the outcome. Furthermore, any democracy requires knowledge on the side of those ruling. If they are elected, a condition for running for office in any of the tripartite branches of government or for presidency must be both a deep knowledge of the (general or specific) subject area involved, but also a spot-free record of incorruptible personal behavior and soberness in any previous political activities.