For the buildings themselves, establishing efficient energy behavior involves passive factors of the architecture, the materials used for the building shell as well as the organization of activities within the building. Architects are supposed, in contrast to artists, to have the comfort of the inhabitants as their primary concern. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. The architect designs a structure he feels is pleasing, and only then calls in the energy-knowledgeable engineer to make the structure realizable, thereby excluding the optimization opportunity that incorporating energy consideration already in the early design phase could have provided. Extreme examples of this kind of failure are seen in buildings with glass facades placed in climates with long periods of high temperature and with high incident solar radiation. Attempts to reduce the heating of the inner rooms from absorption of radiation through the windows may be made through smart window technologies (changing reflectivity with radiation input) and with Venetian blinds, but also when such features are used, the indoor temperature often becomes uncomfortable and active cooling is thus installed, and often in excessive amounts, causing visitors to the building to catch colds when entering from the hot outside to the ‘frosty’ inside. The fact is that proper passive designs can eliminate the need for active cooling in nearly all climates and for nearly all periods of the year. A few hours a year may require cooling, but far from the dominating contribution to energy usage seen at present. Methods include the right choice of materials, providing light by more sophisticated routes than Sun-facing windows, proper design of exterior walls and inside rooms, as well as active cooling methods by intelligent use of water and moisture flows, solar and wind-driven passive or active devices, for example solar chimneys in dry climates and dehumidifiers in wet climates (Bahadori, 1978; also as Chapter 9 in Sørensen, 2011a, where other articles on efficiency are in Chapters 26–36).

The basic measure needed to keep a building comfortable is to insulate the shell. This will reduce heat losses during cold periods, but if used correctly it also will help keeping the inside of the house cooler than the outside in summer. The basic idea is to introduce an intermediate layer in each wall, consisting of a material with many tiny cavities filled naturally by air (that has a low heat coefficient) or filled with a specific substance with insulation properties better than air, but in that case having to create a long-lasting barrier to prevent the gas from escaping. Because a wall should also control humidity flows, gas filling may be inconvenient and currently is only used for transparent parts of the shell, such as windows. The philosophy presently prevailing is to make the building shell very tight although not impenetrable. This means that air circulation (replacing air containing health damaging particles from human skin, cooking and other sources by outdoor air) is essential and thus a ventilation and heat exchange system (to recuperate heat from reject air) is usually part of the building energy system. The previously used acceptance of holes in the shell relied on wind to exchange air, and therefore did not work when wind speeds happened to be low.

Many materials may be used for building walls from metal and concrete to bricks and wood. For smaller buildings, the best solution is to use a sandwich structure where the main part of the wall is insulation material, but with an outside and inside surface of either wood or one of the solid mineral kinds, weatherproof if used on the outside but usually not for the inside wall, that can be made, for example of gypsum. The insulation material between the surfaces can be stone-, glass- or paper wool, or certain pearl-bed plastic materials. Contemporary versions of these employ solutions where structural strength is preserved with inside beams filling only part of the volume, in order to avoid the ‘cool bridges’ where heat could be lost due to the higher transmission in the structural material compared with the insulating material. Proper design considers any heat transfer, whether though the building surface or by air exchange. In order to construct a building today with optimal energy use over its often very long lifetime (with partly unpredictable energy prices), it may well be needed to include a 0.5-m thick layer of insulation, which is easily made part of the design for a new building, but poses challenges for retrofitting older, existing buildings. Basically, adding more insulation material to an existing building wall can be made from the inside or from the outside. Inside insulation is easiest but reduces the indoor area, while outside addition presents architectural problems in creating a new façade of appealing character.

The question is how far labelling and voluntary actions can go in reaching the state of affairs desired from a societal point of view. There will always be citizens reluctant to follow any advice, and as regards existing buildings, some efficiency improvements were done after the 1973/74 energy crisis, but presently efficiency seems to be low on the list of accepted expenses, most of which go in the direction of improving the visual appearance of the building. The simplest way of ensuring that efficiency is improved is to implement regulation, similar to the one existing in most countries aimed at ensuring structural safety of the building. I shall use the Danish regulation as an example of incorporating energy efficiency in the building codes and present suggestions for a gradual improvement of the standard of the already existing building stock. The weakness of the Danish building codes is that they only apply to the construction of new buildings (and recently to major renovation or additions), and because average building lifetimes are exceedingly high in Denmark (over 100 years), the focus on new buildings means that it will take very long to change the overall energy efficiency of the entire building stock. For this reason, the discussion must be extended to discuss measures for existing buildings.

Consider a one-family detached house. Its utility may be assumed proportional to the total floor area, in the present Denmark typically in the range of 100–200 m². The optimal shape of the house is of course spherical, from a surface area to volume point of view, if the lowest heat loss for a given type of surface is the goal. In practice, the situation is more complex. From an indoor architectural point of view, the spherical shape may not be attractive. Furthermore, heat loss is not uniform, but may be different for surfaces facing the ground and air, to the sides or upward, depending on soil type, wind profiles and shadowing objects such as trees or other buildings. The circular profile may for reasons of indoor room design be replaced by a rectangular shape (without extrusion and irregularities contributing to heat loss), but for the upper-end floor area requirement, a two-storey building would be clearly advantageous (closer to spherical shape). Replacing spherical surfaces by flat ones also entails the advantage of being able to install solar panels (other than the flexible surface type) on façades or roof slopes. The best solution will be one that has surfaces suited to solar panel integration facing the appropriate direction (south on the northern hemisphere, north on the southern). The design of rooms for various purposes and placement of windows may also make use of such orientation. Rooms intended for sleep should be placed away from the main solar incidence direction and have few windows, rooms intended for daytime use on the opposite side. This would be true for the case of Denmark but other arrangements would be preferable closer to the Equator, where cooler rooms may also be preferred during daytime. Terrace space for outdoor eating and socializing could be on the rooftop or extending from a side of the house, or it could be courtyard-style spaces in the middle of the building, in climates where such space needs to be cool.

The Danish building code is altered about every 5 years, making new requirements known to the house constructors in advance, so that they can adapt their designs, materials and processes smoothly. The allowable energy use has diminished with time, as detailed in the caption to Fig. 4.1. Over the years, more details of building energy use and energy loss have been considered, as their importance has become apparent. For instance, the 1973/74 energy supply crisis made people perform several energy efficiency measures that could be done easily, such as attic insulation and closing crevices around windows. Subsequently it was realised that some citizens overdid this so that they did not get the minimum indoor air exchange needed, in particular, for concrete-element buildings with radon emissions, but also in other houses due to bedroom dust and the like. Following this experience, the building code requirement for air exchange in kitchens and wet rooms were in 1977 set at 35 L/s, reduced to 25 L/s in 1985 and in 2010 supplemented by a requirement for cross-in/out heat exchange of an efficiency over 70%, implying heat uses of roughly 3000, 2150 and 645 kWh/year for the 200 m² building considered in Fig. 4.1.

A particular problem has been heat loss through windows, much larger and displaced in time compared with solar input through the windows, and typically the heat loss through a window is 10 times higher than through a well-insulated wall per unit area. Traditional Danish buildings have had window areas around 10% of the floor area, but after Danes got into mass tourism to the Mediterranean region, architecture suited for that region became imported to Denmark, where people hoped to get a bit more indoor light during the dark 56°N winters. In reality, significant increase in light transmission to the interior happens only in summer, where it is not needed but rather induces a perceived need for space cooling. Although window technology still causes losses much higher than through walls, the permitted window area in the building codes has now increased from 15% of the floor area in 1977 to 30% in 2010. Despite flaws such as these, the impact of the regulation on new buildings has been generally positive, as exemplified by the significant reduction in heat losses seen for the 200 m² detached house (with doors and windows amounting to 10% of the building shell area, 25% of the floor area) illustrated in Fig. 4.1. In addition to the required minimum energy usage, the present building code recommends a ‘low-energy alternative’, which may point to future reductions, particularly for the insulated walls.

A building energy labelling system required existing buildings to be rated and labelled A–F, and each building had to be assessed before a sale, with a report stating the rating, compulsory to be shown in any real estate advertisement for the house. The disappointing outcome has been that sales prices are practically the same for similar houses with similar location but independent of the energy rating. The standing stock of Danish buildings have a median rating between D and E, corresponding to an average energy loss through the building shell of around 190 kWh/year per m² of floor space, which is more than three times higher than the allowed maximum for new houses. As some building companies have pointed out, this means that it would be economically advantageous in a life-cycle perspective to tear down half the buildings in Denmark and replace them by new ones. This argument does not seem to include the energy content of building materials and energy usage by equipment during demolition and new construction, but even if these were considered, a very large portion of Danish houses should probably be condemned rather than polished up (visually) and resold.

Cooking ranges and appliances for cooling and freezing, clothes and dish washing and drying have long had a labelling system, and as mentioned in Section 3.1.4 this has worked well in squeezing low-efficiency products out. Also for computers and related equipment, the energy efficiency has been systematically rising, but in this case not by regulation but simply because the miniaturization trend has forced the manufacturers to use the solutions with least waste heat as such heat will damage components and in some cases shuts the computer down (a safety feature usually set to go off just below 100°C). This does not mean that more cannot be done and should be done. For example the trend toward very large screens for television sets and stationary computers has almost nullified the reduction in energy consumption happening when cathode ray screen technology was replaced by solid-state solutions. At the other end, for small, portable computers and phones, the stuffing of the apparatus with features has made the interval needed between battery recharging decline from nearly a week to often under a day. A major culprit is again the larger displays. In the case of mechanical devices from lawn movers to saws and cutters, a transition has been taking place from fuel dependency to battery operation, here with fairly acceptable recharging intervals because such equipment is only used for relatively short durations. The other main energy user in homes, offices and shops is light. Here the transition from incandescent and halogen light bulbs to compact fluorescent lamps and light-emitting diode lights has greatly reduced energy use (by factors of 4–7).

In retail commerce, a large amount of energy is used for cool and frost compartments, because these are open for the shoppers to see the goods and therefore the efficiency of well-insulated, closed containers is not reached. Some improvement is made by providing glass covers that the customers have to push open in order to access the merchandise. However, as in the case of windows, this does not help much due to the poor insulation characteristics of glasses, as even double layered glass transmit large amounts of heat (and these are not used in shops, being satisfied with just preventing some of the cold air from escaping).

Again, Denmark may be taken as an interesting case story, because of its substantial car taxation. In part, there is a progressive registration tax of 105% of the bare price for inexpensive cars, rising to 180% for the most expensive ones, with an efficiency-dependent correction. In addition, an annual tax is levied on all cars but graduated according to their energy efficiency, based on the certified European Union test drives along a prescribed mixed urban/nonurban driving cycle. For the most efficient cars, this tax is about €70, and rises with falling energy efficiency to over €1000 for the worst performers. Sales outlets are obliged to mention EU rating and tax in all advertisements. The significant sales of luxury cars support the remarks on customer behavior made earlier. It has been suggested that taxation should be based on a more precise parameter than the average kilometres per litre of fuel, causing confusion when comparing gasoline, diesel, electric and hybrid cars, or cars with different payloads. Sørensen (2007) suggested that instead, taxation or regulation should be based on energy used per unit of mass moved a kilometre and this would solve the problems mentioned earlier. The product of payload (p) and distance (d) is the transport work performed, so if the energy used is e, then the vehicle’s efficiency may be expressed by a performance index, i, written as

This definition can be used for passenger vehicles of any type and size (from one person and up plus allowed filling of luggage compartments) as well as for freight transportation vehicles (now including the cargo mass in the payload) and any other vehicle (trains, airplanes, ships). In consequence, it allows all regulation to be performed with a single requirement, such as allowing only vehicles with i > 350 km kg/MJ. This condition is fulfilled for several available passenger cars, heavy trucks, freight trains and cargo ships, but not for current airplanes.

In many countries, there is competition between public and private transportation, where public transportation is defined as including passenger transport by rail, sea, air or road, comprising both buses and taxis. The railed systems had big success in previous centuries, being faster and likely cheaper than competition from stagecoaches, horse carriages or riding. Buses only could make an indent on the trains after suitable road networks have been built, by offering a denser coverage of destinations. However, as private cars have reached high ownership fractions, the convenience of door-to-door transport has made them take over the bulk of passenger transportation, leaving occupancy percentages in trains and buses at such low values that schedule frequencies have had to be diminished (making these means of transportation less attractive) and prices have gone up, causing further reduction in the number of users (although, strictly calculating, most public transport is in fact still cheaper than driving a private car, at least if there is only one person in the private car).

There are very good arguments to suggest that public transportation should be free. The cost of building and maintaining the road system with dense road networks in populated areas plus regional highways and motorways, including traffic signs, land use, environmental disturbances, noise and visual impacts, in many countries would exceed the revenues from car taxation, and thus it is quite unfair if taxpayers in this way subsidise the use of private cars but not public means of transportation. In any case, having paid (often long ago) the expense of establishing railway tracks it seems rather silly to charge tickets for using them when that scares the customers away.

Bicycles have experienced periods of very high usage, for commuting, shopping and other limited distance trips. This stopped in some countries when people started to settle far from their workplaces and when community shops were replaced by supermarkets, hypermarkets and shopping centres sited on cheap land. Today, most cities are unsuited for motorcars due to pollution and congestion, and in Europe many city centres has been declared off-limits for cars. Therefore, bicycles are again on the rise, both private bicycles for local people and ‘white’ public bicycles for free usage by tourists and other town visitors (in some cities users are unfairly being charged money for using the cycles, despite the general interest of cities to attract visitors). Cars are also most energy inefficient for short ‘shopping’ trips, so insisting that bicycles should be used by all people fit to ride, for shorter trips, is one important step toward making transportation sustainable. It should also be considered to curb the placement of shopping centres and hypermarkets so far away from population accumulation areas that many will deselect bicycles.

There is another relationship between the desirability of shopping by bicycle and the design of sales outlets. The amount of goods that may be carried on a bicycle is smaller than what could be placed in the trunk of a car. Package size, notable for food and general stores should be adjusted accordingly, and access to bicycle parking spaces for loading the shopping cart contents onto the bicycle should be optimized. This is part of a much more general question of the best way to arrange freight transport in a world on the way to sustainability. Clearly, heavier goods purchased should be delivered to where the customers wants them by the selling agent of shop. All supermarkets should, as some do already, offer to deliver what has been bought to where the buyer lives. For nondaily shopping needs (furniture, appliances, garden utilities, etc.), this is already implemented in many places.

In fact, the rising fraction of shopping transactions made on the Internet is helping to make these adjustments happen. Customers are in the European Union offered far better conditions than in physical shops, including 14 days return right with no questions asked. Delivery to the door is in some cases done by vans belonging to the shop, in other cases by public mail or specialized cargo-handling companies. This type of business is conducted with very large differences in energy efficiency. Some vans drive 80% empty most of the time, even on longer trips, while others are always filled up and serve customers located along a string. This has to do with the amount of deliveries made by the furnisher as well as the skill in circuit planning (which my mathematics friends tell me is not a simple job). There is thus room for considerable improvement, such as by always using electric vehicles whenever cheaper under consideration of all environmental externalities, coordinate public and private delivering services in order to maximize efficiency, vehicle filling and vehicle itinerary. Also, it may be to the advantage of competing services to use common delivery vehicles. In the case of long hauls (for that special sofa produced at the opposite end of the country, and more generally for transport between manufacturer and wholesale agent or between wholesale agents and retail-sale outlets), railway transport should be used in combination with local delivery services. This happens all too rarely at present due to the lack of wish to collaborate and practical problems of train schedules, etc. What have already been optimized are the containers used for bulk transport by ship, train or lorry. These have been standardized and the equipment to easily move them from one vehicle of transportation to the next is available and often integrated into the vehicle. One could go further and suggest that most manufacturers and wholesale warehouses should be located at railway tracks, and that the further reloading places (before getting to retail shops or to customers, employing whole sale or individual packages) have layouts amenable to easy shift from train and large lorries to smaller lorries and vans.

One of the largest consumers of transportation energy is commuting between home and workplace. Earlier nearness of working places or preferred hiring of local people has diminished, partly because more jobs require specialized knowledge and settling patterns have changed. Once, industry was placed in city centres and the population at suburbs (if not also in the centres). Today, many families settle in or near recreational areas (because middle-class incomes allow them to), and many businesses settle away from cities where land for offices and production facilities are cheap. This is the result of the period where even substantial transportation was considered of no importance time wise and of little cost because oil prices were low and environmental concerns forgotten. Is there a solution to this dilemma that has sneaked up behind us?

There are things that may help. Apart from the observation made that an increasing number of jobs may be performed from home and therefore do not require regular commuting to and from the employers workplace, an obvious suggestion is to make it the responsibility of the employer to collect the employee at home and bring her/him back after work. If the time used for commuting in this way is included in the salaried work hours, it is in the employer’s interest to make the transport quick and efficient, using different means of transportation depending on the density distribution of employees (buses, minivans, taxi), and in those cases where it is possible, to preferably hire local people. Currently, there is an employee tax credit for commuting expenses in some countries, but this evidently does not provide the carrot for minimizing the cost of commuting in the way that employer administration does.

When it comes to government concerns as to how transportation tasks are performed, there are essentially two ways the society can influence, which options are used and how. One is by imposing a tax progressively hitting the options disfavored, and the other is to introduce regulation excluding the disfavored options. Traditionally, taxation has been used in Europe, while regulation has been used in the USA (for reasons associated with the minimal-state paradigm of preventing governments from accumulating money that may be used for social redistribution purposes). The effect of the two avenues is not quite the same. Regulation (whether pertaining to building safe constructions or to energy use) ensures absolute compliance, while as discussed in previous sections, taxation leaves a group of people who do the things they are discouraged from in order to show that they do not care and have plenty of money. Actually, the opposite effect of the one intended may happen, in that the heavily taxed luxury items, such as fast cars, become attractive and status symbols. Therefore, the US preference for regulation would seem the most recommendable route of action, irrespective of how it was initially motivated.

In both production and raw materials extraction industries, efficiency improvements tend to be associated with invention and introduction of new technologies and new idea for plant design. These improvements are often spurred by criticism for excessive environmental or human health impacts and have proceeded in the direction of eliminating superfluous materials and using less of the necessary materials in the manufacturing processes, making process steps cleaner and using robotic handling of actions that could harm human operators. The production industry is probably more advanced in this respect than the mining industry, whether the latter is working in open fields or drilled underground mines. The future of many raw materials industries is expected to be increasingly influenced by recycling opportunities. The decisive factors then becomes minimizing the work needed for recreating the materials demanded by production industries (e.g., by the reuse options mentioned in Section 3.1.4), exploiting substitution options and making the still required recycling processes more efficient. However, the quest here described for optimization is not currently pursued globally.

Improved recycling efficiency should involve collecting end-of-use products in a form reasonably suited for the separation of components and their reformation into new, pure raw materials (as opposed to indiscriminate incineration, as mentioned in Section 3.1.4). The recommended option of lifetime product service (paid for when buying a product or by lease during the usage period) and manufacturer’s product-take-back at end-of-life obligation should enable the collection of statistics helping not only in improving the product by better design and production, but also helping to make the right decisions for reuse or recycling. A key factor will be transportation of end-of-life products for disassembling and formation of new raw materials. Current ideas of globalization (do the job anywhere in the world, where it is cheap) may have to yield, when the true cost including externalities of long-distance intercontinental transportation is considered.

Just-in-time manufacturing means minimizing situations where products hard to sell are gotten rid of below production cost, also in the interest of efficient use of resources. Many products can be sold by a scheme of starting manufacture only when a purchasing order has been received. Generally, the distinction between products with clear mass-production advantages and those with only small volume-of-production cost dependence may change in favor of the latter, due to improved computerized robotic production and the proposed simpler sales methods.

Many citizens of the current world see themselves a part of a hierarchy of communities. There is family and friends, work colleagues, a local community (sometimes with autonomy in deciding many local matters, say, in city or county administrations), some regional/provincial centres and these combined into a country or nation, which since the introduction of national states have gone from being a tolerated nuisance to an identity-forming entity of the same appeal as the its football team has to many male citizens, at least when they win their games. The transition from accepting to worshipping nations and nationality and flags was introduced as part of the romantic wave sweeping over Europe during the 19th century. With it came new causes to fuel hatred against people hard to distinguish from oneself and to wage wars, as the 19th century national wars and the 20th century world wars show (see Section 4.2.4).

The evidence from Section 3.2.1 suggests that direct democracy, at least before the advent of electronic communication, functioned best in smaller communities. This is also the experience over the last century regarding city and county governments, although the delegates are still elected as representatives. Because people met their local politicians weekly in the local supermarket, there tended to be a toning down of the party-based formal belief sets and an upgrading of the simple goal of improving life and activity within the city or county. A similar closeness to national politicians is rarely felt, and the national government is likely to listen more to industrial and other interest groups than to the somehow distant people voting for a particular government. This becomes worse in cases of poorly constructed supranational entities such as the European Union, and perhaps even more uncertain for the idea of a worldwide governance through an organization such as the United Nations (which, however, still has a certain goodwill locally, due to its fairly objective handling of specific conflict situations such as the events initiating the last war in Iraq).

The suggested conclusion that the previously mentioned remarks may give rise to is that there is a need to distribute governance on different levels, providing decentralized control over issues suitable for that, while maintaining more centralized governance for issues that need uniform solutions, on a national level or on a global level in case of problems such as greenhouse warming.

One may ask whether we need nations at all, noting that the impact they have had since their formation has largely been negative. Could a truncated hierarchy be constructed which retains the local governments for their positive nearness between citizens and their constituencies, but drops the national government that is not anyway felt as representing the citizens, particularly not if political parties are involved, and go directly to the supranational entities that must be there to get coherent solutions to global problems, but of course avoiding distorted solutions where the citizens are deprived influence in favor of special interest groups? The answer is probably that as long as there are nations that would rather extend their territory than see it shrink and where these nations use belligerent rhetoric if not action toward neighbors, it will be difficult to get acceptance for abandoning national entities and the rights they already possess through international law.

Another obstacle to considering more amenable structural divisions of the Earth (e.g., avoiding some presently very big but heterogeneous entities) is the vast differences in political systems prevailing, from dictatorial-controlled nations to countries with some measure of democracy. Of course, the inhabitants of each country have adapted their lifestyles to the prevailing political rules, even if they are not in accord with them, and in many cases, the inhabitants accept the propaganda of the government, accept their country’s attacks on neighboring countries and join the rhetoric denigration of those who think differently or choose to live differently, particularly if they inhabit an adjoining nation. While large countries like the United States are the result of meaningful deliberation (plus a necessary civil war), countries like China and Russia for historical reasons comprise populations with very little in common, being annexed during some earlier imperialistic conquests.

Again, to move in the direction of a more reasonable situation, the key factor is knowledge and awareness penetrating to all layers of each society. As regards knowledge, advances are connected with very basic components of lifestyles. Presently, most people get some level of education when they are young and until recently it was believed that the knowledge acquired in this way would be valid during their entire life. Of course, new information is added by mass media and personal contacts, but systematic updating of the knowledge related to work and leisure, to profession and to being a politically active participant in democracy are rarely offered or available. Instead, massive indoctrination is being imposed to condition people to respond positively to advertisements for products or for political parties.

What is needed is a sober educational system offering lifelong continued education for everyone at a level that makes learning agreeable and does not overshoot the target, but still makes sure that the basic requirements for living in a densely populated society are met and that the recipient can both perform a job suited for the person’s ambitions and abilities, and participate in the democratic shaping of the society. The tools for such education are simple to establish for people having a job, in that a certain fraction of (paid) time should be set aside for further learning, typically 5–10% (highest for professions such as medical doctors). What is different from current educational updates is that also participation in society and its selected form of democracy should be assisted by the lifelong education, teaching citizens to reflect on questions of governance and not be fooled by propaganda. For people out of work or, in social arrangements that allows it or people who prefer not to work (see Section 4.3.1), continued education must at least contain all the social aspects needed for participation in democratic processes, and knowledge updates that the person chooses to take an interest in. Even if someone is not contemplating to re-enter employment (e.g., pensioners), there may well be skills that they want to acquire, say, in information handling or making the most of recreational time.

A special concern is the education of children. The Greek philosophers discussed in Section 3.2.1 saw a clear need for children not to be educated by their parents. This is no less obvious today, where parents abuse their closeness privilege by imposing religious and political as well as economic views often of a quite fundamentalist nature on their children who are unable and unprepared to question these impacts. In modern societies, the parents’ indoctrination is supplemented by kindergartens, preschools/schools as well as by the groups of dominating children present in all such institutions and often representing very backward views on gender issues, on education and on the working of society. The teachers of institutions directed at small children may work to realise more proper proportions in the views of the children attending such institutions, but even here, outdated political views may color the education offered. In other words, achieving the education necessary to participate in a truly democratic society entails a thorough reworking of curricula and teacher education across institutions addressing young children if the archaic views of (some) parents should be seasoned by more accountable information.

Political organizations have similarly in a number of cases interfered in violation of the Human Rights Charter with the daily lives of those adhering to their dogmas, as well as others happening to be under their influence. Examples mentioned in previous chapters are the mob rule of Greek direct democracy in the 5th century bc and of the 1791 French Revolution. Other well-documented cases include the atrocities, including deportation to distant work camps, committed by the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union (not least under Stalin’s rule) and China (when ruled by Mao and his wife), for example the murder of hundreds of thousands people during the ‘Forward Leap’ of forcing farmers to abandon their harvest in order to collect nails dropped on highways for the metal industry. On a smaller, but still significant scale, one could mention the right-wing political parties in a number of countries, who for a long time have prevented medical care from being available also to those not able themselves to pay, and one could mention police actions against labor manifestations and antiwar demonstrators.

It is a responsible government’s primary job to make sure that all citizens have optimal conditions for unfolding their talents and desires. This again follows from the Human Rights Declaration. However, not all political dogmas are consistent with this basic rule. For example neo-liberalism is not, because it aims to increase disparity and concentrate wealth. But certain versions of socialism are not either, as they aim at social structures that are not offering maximum personal freedom for as many as possible, in balance with the social obligations also mentioned in the declaration.

The way most people use modern technology such as tablets and phones, to play games (often with blind violence) and send totally uninteresting messages and pictures to each other is of course an enormous waste of the opportunity for exploiting the technology to interact intelligently on both a communal and a global level. The software offered or advertised along with any kind of computer often make use of only a minute subset of the possibilities available, and finding more interesting software takes personal initiative and willingness to part from the norms of uniform lifestyles and ignore messages from the antivirus software that what you do is ‘unsafe’. There have always been pressures in any society to adhere to the conventional norms of behavior and selection of interests, but this seems to have increased over recent decades, leaving us with less social inhomogeneity than ever before. Lack of conformity is not only a vector for creativeness and inventiveness, but also a vehicle for promoting better understanding among people, both within a society and between societies.

The question of minorities has assumed a very large place in media over the recent decades. Earlier, for example when Hitler came into power in Germany, it was a natural thing for opponents to emigrate to other parts of the world, and particularly to the United States that, being itself a nation built by immigrants, basically received this influx in a positive spirit. This is no longer the case in most countries targeted for migration. People fleeing from brutal dictators and their wars in many parts of the world are no longer welcome elsewhere. They often have to enter other countries illegally, and they are often drowned in unsafe boats offered them at high costs by the mafias already controlling much human and drug trafficking. A counter-argument against accepting these refugees as persecuted is that they may just want to improve their lot in other countries with higher salaries and more opportunities. Certainly, the refugees capable of paying the high fees for being smuggled into another country are not those suffering most under some local upheaval and there would be many left behind who cannot afford the transportation to try to get away. If all those in need should be helped, it would be a mass relocation perhaps beyond the capacity of the richer countries. There are also cultural obstacles to moving people to another physical and social climate, and many refugees do not integrate well in the countries they may manage to reach. It has often been suggested that refugees of local wars and other atrocities should be helped by creating centres in neighboring countries with similar culture and life conditions. However, such centres easily become camps in isolation because the receiving countries are already heavily populated and may have neither spare land nor spare jobs, and in several cases they have problems themselves similar to those of the country being fled from. Furthermore, the international financial contributions often leave much to be desired, even when the centres relieve the donor countries from receiving refugees themselves.

There are no obvious solutions to the refugee problems, other than dealing with the problems people are running away from, and this is currently made difficult on one hand because the United Nations cannot interfere in what is considered internal affairs of a country, and on the other hand, military intervention without UN consent is rarely attempted unless there is a clear economic gain for the intervening country (such as that associated with oil in the Iraq case).

One may go one step further and ask about the situation for minorities within a country. A minority could be a fraction that did not in an election get a majority in parliament but any percentage up to 50% of all votes. It is clearly not in line with democracy based on human rights with its request for tolerance, if a 51% majority governs without taking the conditions of the remaining 49% into account or maybe even prosecute them and rob them of money and assets. However, this is how many countries are governed today, although governments with a bit of decency do not dramatically change the lot of the minority.

The issue may also be taken further ‘down’ into society, asking questions of tolerance toward any type of minority (immigrants, homosexuals, abortionists, people with long noses or a religion different from the leading one). The democracy of a country must be measured by the way in which all of these smaller or larger minorities are treated. Today we see political parties launching hate campaigns against one or another such minority, without seeing or admitting that this is in contradiction to both the Human Rights Charter and the democracies built upon it. It would seem more than reasonable if a democracy set rules that make it impossible for parties and candidates with stated pejorative views on minorities to gain seats in parliament as well as within the juridical or executive branch of government. The only example of such rules that comes to mind is the German postwar legislation to ban communists and neo-Nazis from any public position.

Going back to the 4th millennium bc, the chronology of wars presented here has been constructed primarily on the basis of Kinder and Hilgemann (1991). This source does not estimate death tolls, but gives a description of each conflict, with maps of land areas involved and the actors intervening in what are often quite complex struggles. Based on these descriptions and roughly known populations in the areas concerned, death tolls have been estimated. In cases where they can be compared with those of the Wikipedia numbers, for example for the 1st millennium after the conventional year zero, the estimated numbers tend to be consistently smaller, perhaps because they are conservative estimates, but perhaps more likely because some of the early Wikipedia numbers, although backed by written documents, are too high, which as suggested could due to a bias at the sources. There are other considerations supporting this observation. For example the number of warriors involved in the Viking raids and settlements all over Europe some thousand years ago are backed by Nordic Sagas giving the number of boats used for the Viking expeditions during the relevant time period (Sørensen, 2012b). The Vikings won some battles and lost others, suggesting that the armies they encountered were of a size not much different from their own, and these observations together thus put an upper limit on the possible death tolls, that is found to be consistent with the estimates made on the basis of event narratives, but not with the largest of the Wikipedia numbers.

An important indicator of war intensity is the ratio of war-induced deaths and the total population in the world, shown in Fig. 4.3. In order to calculate its variation over time, the population data shown in Fig. 4.2 have been used. They are taken from Wikipedia (2015c), based on the US Department of Commerce (2015) and Kremer (1993). It must be admitted, that since both population estimates and war toll estimates are uncertain, their ration is even more so. However, its variations are so pronounced that the interpretation rendered by Fig. 4.3 would appear rather robust. Around 3000 bc, major wars occurred in the Mesopotamian region. The similar battles over Egyptian land appear less deadly, but largely due to the increase in world population taking place during the first 2 millennia bc. Around year zero, however, dramatic increases in war tolls appear, predominantly due to the imperialistic campaigns of the Roman Empire, but also of the Greek–Macedonian expansion under King Alexander and from 184 to 280 the Three Kingdom War in China. Around 600, the most significant war is in Korea, around 700 the Arab invasion of India and in the mid-8th century an Arab–China conflict. The death tolls are very large, primarily due to the very large populations involved. All the time there are a multitude of wars with smaller death tolls, but according to the data, they amount to only a small fraction of the growing total world population from 940 to 1200, despite incidences such as the crusades of the Roman Catholic Christian church. The subsequent period 1200–1415 is one of the bloodiest in world history, primarily due to the religious Hundred Year War between England and France, the Mongolian conquests and the upcoming of the aggressive Ottoman Empire in Turkey. All assuming that the estimates used are not too far off. The next rise in death tolls occurred during the 16th century, due to religious wars between Christian Catholics and Protestants and also the Spanish invasion of South America and the Japanese invasion of Korea. The following centuries see many devastating wars, including French–English fights in North America, the Napoleonic wars, and conflicts in South Africa, but the most life-consuming wars occur in the 19th century (e.g., the Taiping religion-related revolt in China) and in the 20th century (World Wars I and II, the Sino–Japanese War and the Mao Zedong execution of domestic enemies and his killing of an estimated 30 million people by starvation in ‘The great leap forward’, mentioned in Section 4.2.2). The Stalin and Mao killings are included although they are not real civil wars (the other side was unable to fight back), but they still lead to as large a death toll as the worst wars and are initiated with the purpose of hitting political opponents within a particular country.

It was suggested earlier in this book, that wars have largely been absent before the invention of property, associated with the transition from migrating hunters and gatherers to sedentary agriculturists. There is a fair amount of evidence for this statement, through analysis of dated skulls and skeletons, for which the start of the agricultural period (around 5,000–12,000 years ago in various parts of Europe and the Middle East) is associated with a marked increase in weapon-induced head and body wounds (Bennike, 1985, for Denmark; see also Becker, 1952; Sørensen, 2012b). Based on such finds related to warfare or at least violent conflicts, one may try to extend the death toll estimates to times before conventional historical source material, as done in Fig. 4.4 (note logarithmic scale). Here, it is also attempted to categorise the wars into territorial wars, religious wars and other kinds, such as civil wars or the one-sided mass killings within countries.

An alternative to the skull-based estimate of violent death during the Neolithic (agricultural) period is to make a time-wise simulation of demographic development based on identified components of birth and death rates. This has only been done for particular cases (Sørensen, 2011b,  2012b), but the finding is consistent with the skull data at the introduction of agriculture. The behavior of the death-by-violence part of Fig. 4.4 is governed by the population growth, with the jump at the introduction of farming as the only large anomaly. Before the year −3000 (i.e. 3000 years before the currently used zero), most violence did not have the character of war, but rather of conflicts on a personal level or raiding a village. After this year, such nonmass violence is not included in Fig. 4.4, although it certainly continued to take place, right up to the gun-shooting incidences in current times. During this long period, war mortality is predominantly among those fighting, although civil population would suffer from the destruction of buildings and food stores, but approaching the present epoch, most wars have very substantial civilian losses.

Fig. 4.4 attempts to divide the wars into territorial wars, religious wars and other types of wars, such as civil wars and power struggles, and is based on the sources mentioned. In several cases, more than one category is involved, for example territorial and religious, and the assignment has involved an estimate of which cause was the leading one. The thesis that religion grew out of mythology was forwarded in Sørensen (2012b), noting that myths were stories elaborated as they were told and retold at village fireplaces, while religion was a mixed bag of dogmas, overviewed by a priesthood, an institution that did not allow practitioners to modify the gospel, even if its origin could have been in mythology. Religions appear soon after the introduction of property and agriculture, when society has started to become stratified and a need for keeping the layers of society at their places is perceived by the ruling classes. Religions often introduce the idea of an afterlife, promised to those toiling with few rewards in their real life. One would then expect religious wars to appear, with some delay, after the Neolithic revolution had introduced agricultural, stratified societies in a given region of the world.

However, it seems that a considerable amount of time had to pass before significant religious wars happened. A likely reason is that not all religions are missionary. As a method to control the layering of a given society, religion does not need war (but possibly it creates internal conflicts in the society). Only when the desire to impose one country’s religion on the rest of the world is appearing, does religion become associated with war, notably because the neighboring societies may not want the religion of the missionary society, either because they have their own religion or because they do not want to yield power to foreign, formal institutions. Categorizing the wars through history, there are cases where the label ‘religious war’ is easy to assign (e.g., the crusades, the Thirty Years’ War), while other cases are complex and imposing a new religion on an adversary may only be a ‘side effect’ of territorial ambitions. Of course, wars of any kind may in many cases be conducted primarily to exhibit the power ambitions of the ruler starting the war, but as often, practical issues such as access to resources play a dominating role in initiating wars.

The first religious war included in Fig. 4.4 is that of the Egyptian polytheists cleansing during the period −1358 to −1350 of the country’s followers of the former pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic Ra-worship, and then the −845 to −839 Jewish conflicts with adherents of Baal and other gods, and subsequently the −600 to −570 Greek Sikyon–Fokon holy war and the −168 Hasmonean revolt in Israel. During the most recent 2 millennia, clear religious wars emerge primarily from two religions: Christianity and Islam, religions where the requirement of spreading the religion by missionary activity is central. Two periods stand out in Fig. 4.4 as nearly free from religious wars: the 15th century and the period from 1718 to 1850. From 1850, major religious wars are again abundant, notably in China, Africa, India, Pakistan and the Middle East.

Because Fig. 4.4 uses a logarithmic scale in order, the wars with ‘other causes’ placed on top appear less conspicuous than they are. This is borne out in Fig. 4.5, which reproduce the recent 5000 years from Fig. 4.4 on a linear scale. It shows that civil wars and related atrocities within a nation become significant from about 1740 and are dominating after World War II. Territorial wars appear much reduced after 1950, but some of the internal conflicts actually have the purpose of splitting a given nation into autonomous parts.

In any case, Figs  4.3–4.5 convey the sad message that the human societies are still as belligerent as they were in the late Stone Age and that military technology has allowed them to increase casualties substantially. Also the nonwar–related violence, depicted in Fig. 4.4 only before the year −3000, does not seem to have diminished. The current level of worldwide average death by nonwar interpersonal violence is at 0.007% of the total population (WHO, 2015), compared with 0.002% of the population at the year −3000, according to Figs 4.2 and 4.4. There are large differences between regions of the world, with currently more than two orders of magnitude difference between the highest and the lowest national figures (World Health Rankings, 2015).

One reason for the recent increase in wars and war-like confrontations is the behavior of the weapons industry, thriving from selling any weapons to any state or group willing to pay. The armament of nations, whether peaceful or belligerent, has today reached a level that in most cases is out of proportion to the threats conceivably facing a country. This situation has been ascribed to a military–industrial complex, where the two sectors boost themselves and each other in importance or profits, based on mostly false evaluations of potential threats and certainly false convictions of how to best deal with threats (e.g., when US president Reagan changed the status of nuclear weapons from tools for deterrence to tools for actual combat use, preferably on land far away from his own). The arms trade and the associated lobbyism is presently dominated by Western countries and Russia as sellers, with Middle Eastern, Asian or African totalitarian states and opposition groups including terrorists as large buyers, along with other Western countries. The industrial interests behind this trade have repeatedly blocked any attempt to limit arms trade or at least armament of the most belligerent countries and terrorist organizations, because the current politically accepted neo-liberal paradigm and GNP-fixation does not question any transaction earning money to industry.

A halt to the rise in deadly and disabling conflicts will require action by the world community, actually just enforcing Paragraph 3 in the rules of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (Section 2.3.1). Part of this requirement would be to implement worldwide legislation forbidding any trade of arms, at first between nations but in the next phase also within nations (e.g., outlawing privately owned guns and not making exceptions for self-declared ‘hunters’ and the like, but only keeping arms permissions for the law-enforcing and defence institutions). It may be argued that this puts the nations capable of producing their own weapons at an advantage relative to countries without this capacity. The truth is rather that the countries not having reached a technological stage allowing them to produce what they see as desirable state-of-the-art weapons are also those most likely to abuse the use of such weapons.

A comprehensive ban on use of weapons and violence to deal with international conflicts has long been a dream, but it requires a supra-national institution such as the United Nations, but upgraded to be capable of stopping any nation trying to break the ban on using arms. This calls for a military role of the United Nations, which today is only indirect, because resolutions by the Security Council to intervene in specific countries must rely on willingness of volunteer nations to put soldiers and weaponry at the disposal of the United Nations. One may ask if it is at all realistic to suggest a future world without wars and aggression. Some would argue that violence is built into the human genes (from our past as hunters and gatherers). I do not think that it can be put as simple as that. Most human behavior is governed by a mix of genetic dispositions and learned attitudes derived from the kind of society we live in and are receiving lessons in ‘acceptable conduct’ from. Precisely the Mesolithic hunter and gatherer societies were as discussed earlier much less violent than the societies emerging after invention of real estate property, after formation of institutionalized religions and national states, and after the recent predominance of the neo-liberal paradigm, making armed conflicts a desirable way of earning large profits. My conclusion is that things can change, once we realize which ingredients of our societal setup are responsible for the enhanced belligerence. A key component to change would be the nationalistic perceptions surrounding nations (while not abolishing regional differences, just getting away from the romanticizing flag and ‘we–them’ attitudes that have come to characterize national entities). Equally important is the establishment of an economic framework that does not reward armament and war. The suggestion of replacing the indiscriminate GNP measure of wealth by an MDA (Section 3.1.2) that would recognize some economic transactions as undesirable will be a basic step in this direction.

Those who believe that violence is a genetic trait may consider pinpointing the exact location of the DNA chunk responsible and use genetic engineering (when reaching a more advanced stage than the current one) to modify it. Hopefully, this will long remain outside our reach, as it would equally permit genetic manipulations to make currently peaceful individuals more aggressive and supporters of war as a solution to perceived problems. The alternative is strengthening the international role in governance, by giving an upgraded United Nations the required power to resolve conflicts involving violence between or within nations. Nations must learn to obey an international court of law, and any issue involving more than one nation should by default be referred to such an international body. This does not mean that the international court should interfere in matters clearly of only national or local interest. A basic rule of working democracy is that decisions should be made as closely to those affected as possible. This means retaining local institutions that deal with local issues, national institutions dealing with national issues, but giving the global institutions a more well-defined area of supremacy than at current, and with the power to enforce the decisions it makes. Recent development has gone in the direction of removing power from both the local and the global sphere and giving it to the national governments. Local councils close to the population communities have been replaced by regional entities, where regions are often too large to make people personally know the people making decisions at the regional level. Furthermore, national politicians often unnecessarily mix into local debates that they should have left to the local decision makers (probably as an unbecoming advertisement for national re-election). Also, the media has helped at enlarging the distance between local people and international institutions, by creating a widespread indifference to things happening outside the national boundaries (this is particularly obvious in the European Union, where members of the European Parliament get nearly zero media attention relative to members of the national parliaments). There is a need for creating a novel structure with a clear division of issues between the three levels of governance: local, national and global.

With respect to reducing violence, efforts should clearly be started at a local level, focusing on two issues: to reduce the potential conflict causes (which might be unemployment or economic disparity) and to reinforce tolerance (by quitting the economic dogmas appealing to selfishness, as one obvious issue to deal with). Peace is much easier to create and maintain, if disparities in assets are small, and if local communities retain some measure of decision power.

Of course, there will remain a group of people already educated to hate, to be violent and unforgiving. The goal is to make this group diminish, which almost certainly will require a (maybe prolonged) period with more strict enforcement of the laws most closely related to discouraging violence. This is part of the emphasis on the human rights–human obligations link. Punishments such as imprisonment has in some parts of the world developed into a well-meaning attempt to reintegrate convicts into civil society, but often with less consideration for the victims (in cases of violent crimes) and often creating in-prison gangs planning further crimes and often hardening first-time offenders to a perpetual life as criminals. One (certainly debatable) solution would be shorter terms in prison, but in isolation and with offering of tailored further education rather than entertainment).

The Milners approach basic income from another angle. They are worried about the low productivity of early 20th century British industry, suggesting that workers deliberately slow down their work pace in order not to lose their jobs when the task is completed. Fear of poverty drives the British economy, and one solution would be to introduce a guaranteed basic income, removing the fear and thus opening for improved work efficiency and increasing productivity. The financing of the basic income is suggested to be by a new tax of, say, 20% on all contributions to the national income, entailing the further benefit that everybody would want the total production to increase, no matter whether their share of the cake is only the basic salary available through even distribution of the 20%, or if work activity has made their share larger. All taxes should be collected at the source, and David Milner estimate in his 1920 book that public administration would be greatly reduced.

Evidently, these proposals were influenced by the Russian Revolution and its introduction of centralized communism, but Russell in particular already warned that communism was not the right road, as it would lead to oligarchic concentration of power. Russell wanted as many decisions as practical to be delegated to local communities. In the United Kingdom, labor politician Juliet Rhys-Williams (1943) brought the basic income idea to new political attention during World War II.

The basic income debate surfaced again during the 1970s, particularly in Australia starting with a parliamentary poverty debate (Australian Government, 1975), in the Netherlands (Kuiper, 1976) and in Denmark (Meyer et al., 1978). The official Australian study goes through the quantifications of the need for altered income taxation if a basic income is introduced, much like the one presented below for Denmark, and with several variants. The Danish study by Meyer, Petersen and Sørensen identified a number of problems with the current system, including watering down democracy to party-based politics, unsustainable consumption and increased centralization, as the reasons to seek alternatives, and suggests basic income as a possible solution, along with a discussion of the moral right to work and of worker’s influence on production decisions.

During the 1990s and continuing into the present century, while neo-liberalism swept over the broad economic thinking of most countries, its emphasis on increasing inequality has made oppositional ideas of economic justice through income sharing multiply, albeit generally drowning in the noise of the preferred paradigm. In nearly all countries across the world, basic income schemes have been developed and debated, from the United States to Namibia. A modest selection is van Parijs (1992, for the Netherlands); van Trier (1995, Belgium); Rankin (1997, New Zealand); Tomlinson (2001, Australia); Vicenti et al. (2005, Italy); Jordan (2012, the United Kingdom); Sheahen (2012, the United States); Birnbaum (2012, Sweden); Caputo (2012, several countries); Murray and Pateman (2012, several countries); Lo Vuolo (2013, Latin America) and Fabre et al. (2014, Germany). These studies deal with slightly different variants of basic income, from ‘negative tax’ to ‘guaranteed minimum income’, and while the condition for qualifying as a ‘basic income’ is that no work or other requirements are attached to the payment, there is a considerable number of other studies proposing weaker concepts where the basic income is only for those needing it, implying that the advantage of less administrative work is partially lost, because someone has to decide who is ‘needing’. Actually, most countries today have some kind of social payments accorded to recipients found eligible, but unconditional payment to everyone exists only in the common schemes for rewarding fertility by an unconditional fixed payment to the guardian of each child below a certain age. This practice was initiated in countries needing soldiers for their war activities.

Fundamentally, a society consists of its people, their skills and aims, and the stock of buildings, equipment, natural resources, etc. that are available. From one economic point of view, the output (production) of industry and business characterize the level of development, with human work seen as input required along with machinery and capital. From another economic point of view, the basic entity is the population and its aspirations, based on which it may be decided to develop ideas for implementation and to manufacture products seen as desirable, plus eventually other products for export, the earnings of which can satisfy the cost of importing those items best produced elsewhere. The latter approach is suitable for discussing the basic income idea, and it will be further pursued in Chapter 5. Here, a simple model will be presented based on the Danish case study of Section 3.1.3, in order to exhibit the basic changes in a nation’s economy implied by the introduction of a basic income. It assumes that the structure of industry and other business is largely unaltered and generate nearly the same revenue as today, in terms of a total sum of money available for salaries, and with roughly the same products and services for domestic consumption and the same import/export relations. A slight reduction in activity is caused by the elimination of some social services and the corresponding financial management, which is not needed when basic income is introduced. In particular, this applies to the setup of social redistribution instruments, modified from that of Fig. 3.5 to one in which the guaranteed basic income for everyone eliminates public unemployment relief and most of the poverty compensation. The objective is to see what burdens the basic income concept may be placing on levels of taxation and chores of administration.

The current situation in Denmark regarding earned and public transfer incomes and taxation for the adult population (4.6 million out of a total of 5.6 million) is shown in Table 4.1 (related to Figs 3.5, 3.7 and 3.8). It is seen that the current taxation of the total personal income excluding transfer incomes, directly and indirectly through value added and point taxes, is at about 41%, leaving an average of 18,480 €/year per cap. as disposable income.

In constructing the basic income model, guidance may be derived from the present average (over all adult citizens) private consumption of 9128 €/year per cap. [Statistics Denmark, 2015a; including value added tax (VAT) and point taxes] and from the current subsidy of 3600–5900 €/year per cap. (after tax) to students not living with their parents. For other people losing their employment and having no insurance (most Danes have an unemployment insurance securing 90% of their normal salary for a couple of years), the public cash subsidy is about 10,000 €/year per cap. after tax, but contingent upon active job seeking and diminished if the local authorities do not think the job search is sufficiently wholehearted. In view of this range of figures, a basic salary with no work requirement and amounting to 8000 €/year per cap. is used in the model example, but the effect of alternative levels would be easy to derive. This amount is not subjected to direct tax, but purchases are subject to VAT and point taxes, which are not eliminated because they serve specific behavior-regulating purposes. The basic salaries are paid to all adult Danish citizens, which currently amount to 4.6 million out of a total population of 5.6 million (82%). Table 4.2 shows the new balance for the overall national budget.

The introduction of a basic income is seen to entail some reductions in the need for public subsidy payments, such as government unemployment and sickness salary loss compensation and some of the social subsidies paid to families suddenly having faced a loss of income (e.g., assistance with housing payments), but it does not alter public help not related to job situation, for example child benefit payments. As mentioned, the total national income is not assumed to change significantly, considering that there will likely be enough citizens wanting to augment their income by salaried work. A modification in the number of public jobs occurs due to the elimination of several controlling jobs in the public sector, because of the more straightforward payment of the basic salary. Further reductions in total jobs may arise from a streamlining of the financial sector, taking advantage of the simplification of tax payments and public money transfers. Yet, it is quite possible that such ‘lost jobs’ are compensated by new job-creating activities in other areas, within the public or private sector.

One option for carrying out the optimization of money transactions associated with the basic income scheme will be to replace all paper money with drawing rights on a central bank, which may be seen as a small step from the current electronic payment options, which by the way have been criticized for removing control of money flows from the government, in favor of private banks and little transparent financial institutions. The central bank (which could be the existing national bank, but also a concessioned privately operated bank) would receive all business incomes and pay all business expenses from within the country as well as from abroad, and would transfer net basic and taxed work salaries to the citizen’s accounts and taxed dividends to the business owners, and it would handle all trade arrangements (including any import taxation, VAT and applicable point taxes). Taxation would still be progressive but simplified, particularly if a ceiling is placed on maximum income, as suggested. The balance would go to government services without any need for a specific income tax administration, be used for the remaining local or central government services, and for all private or public investments. As this arrangement is likely less labor-intensive than the present setup, a national income reduction has been effected in Table 4.2, associated with the reduction in administrative work. The monetary arrangement described here has further advantages in that tax-fraud, black-market tax-evading work arrangements and other system misuses currently flourishing will diminish or disappear. Finally, the nonsocial government expenditures (education, health, etc.) is modestly reduced, because it includes public works of little sustainable character, such as military adventures abroad (without UN consent) and the continuous adding of motorways between villages and small towns that happens to be in the constituency of a minister or his party chums.

The bottom line balance emerging from Table 4.2 is that the basic income concept may be introduced in a society such as the Danish one with full economic consistency and actually a relatively small change of the current economic flows. The reduction in government expenses is similar to the new basic income expense, so that the level of taxation would be nearly unaltered, except for the assumption to remove the national deficit made in Table 4.2. Around 4.2% of the total personal income in Table 4.2 is dividends and interest earnings from owning businesses or possessing wealth, and the available money for consumption is practically unchanged from the current one (the income is in lines 1 and 4 of Table 4.2, and the after-tax disposable income only slightly above the present one given in line 1 of Table 4.1, while the total private and business taxation in line 3 of Table 4.2 is very modestly increased, when adjusting for the government budget deficit). The basic income idea is thus realisable at the level stipulated, with added benefits in eliminating psychological problems of unemployed people presently having to report regularly to employment centres and possible feeling excluded. Those who take work will actually have a higher income, if the assumption on total national income is maintained, because they get both work salary and basic income. One could express this by stating that the reduction in administrative jobs for the basic income scenario is compensated for by those leaving the work sector and living on the basic income alone. In the further reflections on the implementation of a basic income model one should consider whether work salaries should be decreased due to everybody already getting the basic salary, and it may be contemplated that a ceiling on work salaries could be imposed. A ceiling of six times the basic salary (after tax) will appear generous to most and hurt only a few people currently being paid salaries far above the valuation of any personal effort delivered. Further changes in income and taxation may substantiate if the current GNP-focus is replaced by using an MDA indicator to set goals, which will alter priorities among activities. In any case, such considerations will be left to the scenario discussions in Chapter 5.

A simple case illustrating the decentralization issue has been provided by the history of access to electricity. Because many technologies desired by any society are operated on electric power, an effort has been made worldwide to supply electricity to as many people as possible. This was fairly easy in cities and other places with a high population density, but more complex for remote areas. Should one extend the power grids to such areas or find local ways of producing power. Both are expensive. During the early 20th century, alternatives to centralized (usually coal-fired) power stations were diesel sets using oil products, or wind turbines and later solar power. Long power line extensions are expensive, but so is transport of diesel oil and wind turbines, and the choices made in different regions were not always the same, although as time went on, at least until recently, the grid extension was increasingly preferred. One ingredient in this economic argument was the price of centrally produced power.

In early 20th century France, a socialist government decided that all customers should pay the same price for a kilowatt-hour of electricity, no matter if they lived in a city or in the countryside. The city inhabitants thus subsidised the rural users that did not have to pay the full price of the grid extension (Gouvello and Matarasso, 1998). One result was the elimination of a nascent French wind turbine industry. In other parts of Europe, electricity prices varied according to the cost of generation plus transmission and distribution, making electrification of rural areas a very slow process. A third choice, for example in Denmark, was to differentiate prices, but not to the full extent suggested by costs, in order to speed up the electrification of all parts of the country. As a result, the wind industry did well and by 1920 had installed around 90 MW of wind capacity, notably on the many Danish islands, where power grid extensions would have been particularly expensive (Sørensen, 2012b). This eased the acceptance of the current use of wind energy, which by 2014 reached 5000 MW and 39% of the total electricity use (Danish Wind Industry Association, 2015).

The power grid example shows that centralized decisions, however well meant, are not always the best choice. The same can be said of the globalization move that has been advocated in recent decades. In one respect it resembles the French example, as one purpose seems to be to have the same price of commodities all over the world (no customs duties, no taxation on freight). However, the concept is flawed both because ‘externalities’ are not included and because the quality of the products traded is not considered. The nice words about economic rationality demanding that production is deferred to the regions with the lowest salaries have no validity, when third-world workers are mistreated, when environmentally unsound resources and methods are used in production, when the life of the product is appallingly short and when shipment around the world is done with heavily subsidised prices (e.g., due to the World Trade Organization’s unwillingness to consider global climate and environmental impacts of shipping). It is fine that the rich nations want to help the poor ones by deferring production to them, but only if all the other requirements of sustainable production have been met. If not, it would seem better to recognize that the world is divided into regions at very different stages of development, and that the same measuring sticks cannot be employed everywhere.

Another consequence of globalization is that inhabitants of less privileged countries learn about the amenities of the rich (but fail to see that they are unsustainable or see it and want themselves to go through that stage with its large cars) and that many people from the less developed countries want to migrate to the rich countries in order to immediately enjoy their privileges rather than contribute to the slower process of local development. This was not realized then the United Nations formulated it as a human right to travel to and settle in any other country. Presumable the UN lawyers thought of the World War II refugees that were welcomed only in some countries. Clearly, the current mass-migration out of Africa, Mexico and some parts of the Middle and Far East is only partially prompted by the wars in the regions, and as much based on the hope of a better life in Europe, Australia or the United States. Migration around a finite planet will likely always be an inferior solution to making life conditions right where people are.

A decisive factor in most of the issues of globalization and decentralization is the level of education and knowledge from sources other than education. This was discussed in Section 4.2.1, concluding that current societies cannot function properly without continued education of as many of its members as possible. Education that is not rote learning of facts, as in the schools of many countries today, but acquiring skills in problem solving and tools for learning more, including the ability of self-teaching without always needing the presence of a teacher. Such ideas developed from Rousseau (1762) and von Rochow’s experiments with teaching young farmers how to do their job better (Alexander, 1918), leading to Grundtvig’s Folk High Schools in Denmark (Simon, 1989; Borish, 1991), and more recently received important contributions of problem-oriented teaching and group work for formulation and solution of projects, by Montessori (1912). Her ideas are currently taken up in degrees by a modest number of schools and universities around the world.

The idea behind the Folk High Schools is that education is offered in flexible packages, but without any kind of diploma awarded. It is entirely up to the participant to absorb the knowledge being offered. This does not mean that qualifications should never be evaluated. You would like your medical doctor to know his business, but the point is that exam results obtained at the end of her or his studies (perhaps many years ago) are poor indicators of their present qualifications, regarding familiarity with new scientific advances and the experience in performing the best tests to arrive at a correct diagnosis. Such qualities are best measured by actual performance and can be based on concrete (sometimes statistical) information gathering.

Only with a sufficient level of knowledge can citizens appreciate the complex consequences of globalization based on an uncontrolled trade regime, or the implications of current watering down of democracy by centralized party-rule and efforts to increase the domain sizes for any decentralized local councils, in order to remove the nearness-aspects of democratic participation. A particularly negative example is the European Union that on paper heralds a ‘nearness principle’ but does not even allow citizens to vote in general referenda on important issues. Also for unfolding the ideas of democratic participation, whether local or for larger regions, educational skills are indispensable, if democracy is not to decay into media and spin doctor–manipulated oligarchies.

Highlights include the description of the financial sector developing from institutions helping private and businesses to finance physical commodities like buildings and machinery to half-criminal entities ripping money from those who can least afford it and giving it to the top 1% state of society. Means are emergency loans with annual interest rates often above 100%, but also buying companies in trouble in order to milk them for value and letting them go bankrupt in order to use the apparent losses for the financial company to avoid taxation, and further having betted on the failure in advance (hedge funds). To this comes a wealth of schemes for moving fictive money around, only to create profit for the financial company. Currency exchange including trade aimed at destabilizing weak currencies and making a gain from knowing beforehand that this will happen. Financing political campaigns for corrupt politicians expected to support the activities of the financial sector. Turning mortgage into financial products (derivatives) that will cost the debtor more than anticipated from the original lender. Moving risk from banks to taxpayers, as it happened massively after the 2007/08 financial collapse, but retaining the rewards at the banks. Investment banks that trade in any kind of security, creating suitable crises by themselves and profiting on both positive and negative developments. The growth of the financial sector into such a monster is illustrated in Fig. 4.6 for the United States, where this sector now is responsible for nearly half of all loans and other liabilities, but in contrast to the other sectors depicted, without contributing anything tangible to society.

The corresponding US financial asset distribution shown in Fig. 4.7 shows how the artificially low current interest rates, caused by the injection of fictive money into the system by the finance sector, has placed more money for consumption in the hands of (the wealthiest) households, while moving the corresponding liabilities to the finance sector (Fig. 4.6) in order to allow the profit to accumulate there. The total balance of the financial sector is still a financial deficit amounting to as much as the US GDP, but figures for assets are less significant than those of liabilities, because the valuation of assets is mostly done arbitrarily by the financial sector (or their stooges in governments and central banks) themselves. The Occupy Wall Street Banking Group has clearly demonstrated how executives move back and forth between the financial predator companies and the government or its central bank.

Streeck (2014) and Merkel (2014) describe this development and argue that it has eroded democracy to such as extent, that there is currently no control of the financial sector, its massive lobbying directed at governments and central banks, and its success in doing all this due to the fact that voters have lost any control over who is making the decisions. The neo-liberal version of capitalism can no longer coexist with democracy, and the nations earlier claiming democratic governance have been turned into oligarchic states that in many ways resemble current China.

Is there a way to revert to democracy and to remove the power of at least the most corrupt part of the financial sector? Streeck hopes that the neo-liberal system will collapse even if there is no clear alternative in sight. The Alternative Banking Group of the Occupy Wall Street movement makes a few concrete suggestions, while realizing that this would just constitute a beginning: Implement a system of responsibility for everyone working in the finance sector, similar to what has worked in the medical profession (the Hippocrates oath, etc.). Outlaw private financial companies’ hiring of government regulators, and vice versa. Increase the required cushion against losses that banks are required to have. Require all collateral security to be physical and real. Make regulation affecting ordinary citizens more transparent.

More serious efforts to curb the subversive actions of some players in the finance sector have been touched upon in previous sections of this book. The idea is to revert to the classical role of banks and other financial institutions as mediators of surplus capital to promising business or real estate projects, but to stop any profit-making from empty moving fictive or real money around with no one to gain except the financial company. One may say that this approach is part of an effort to designate certain sectors as being too important to society to leave to vacillating market forces. Such sectors would at least include law-and-order institutions (including police and military), financial institutions, energy providers and communication services, as well as several infrastructure facilitators (roads, transportation systems). Society and its chosen government must have full control of such strategic sector, setting business rules and approving prices. This does not mean (but also does not exclude) government ownership, but the private companies running such services for the society would be what used to be called ‘concessioned companies’, in that they on one hand may use their business skills to operate efficiently, but on the other hand cannot depart from the rules set by the society in which they operate. The initial rationale for having such concessioned companies was the repeated occurrence of wars that would have disrupted any such service, if it had passed to foreign owners or depended on imported raw materials. One of the rules that should be set by society is therefore that if a strategically important business is owned by a foreign investor, then each transfer of assets of that business out of the country must be approved by the government.

The suggestion was made in Section 4.3.1 that all money-handling operations should be electronic and in the hands of a government bank or a national concessioned financial company. In this way the government would have direct control over the financial sector in a way that would make it straightforward to eliminate any nonpermitted transactions. If also the practice of advertising were abandoned in favor of factual consumer information, the quick loan offers at astronomical interest rates would disappear (in fact, they are already outlawed in some countries). The counter-argument ‘what should the poor people do else when they cannot pay their bills’ is of course invalid: their situation will in any case be worse if they take a quick loan at an usurious interest rate than if they can settle the issue with the creditor or even if they declare inability to pay. This calls for realizing a third suggestion made earlier in this book, as part of setting new goals and requirements for education: all children growing up should be taught skills in dealing with personal economy and understanding the mechanism of financial transactions.

Considering an augmented role for governments in regulating financial affairs, it is very important that governments can also be held responsible if they do not act in the interest of their constituency. This relates to the democratic setup of the three-partite division of legislative, executive and legal branches. In principle, the legal branch solely judge if the existing laws are complied with, not if they are just or reasonable, and although the executive branch (the government) can suggest news laws to the legislative (parliament) branch, they are only supposed to administer the existing and parliamentary passed legislation. Often, the government tries to assume a more expanded role, where some decisions are going beyond just administering the legislation already in place, and it is therefore important that the members of government can be held accountable. This is in many countries vested with the Supreme Court judges and in some cases it requires a majority consent by parliament to punish or dismiss a minister or president, say, by impeachment. In a few countries, a further avenue has been exploited, by appointing a ‘public overseer’ (sometimes using the Danish word ‘ombudsman’, which does not rule out that a woman could hold the job), who by his own choice can raise any issue in parliament that he feels involves a misuse of authority. The overseer is usually a highly respected judge, and the motivation for this additional institution is that the courts cannot raise cases on their own. It is still questionable, if the overseer institution works, except for a certain protection of individuals that may have been mistreated by a government (say by passing laws that are not general but directed at a person or a small group, which is usually illegal). In Denmark, where the ‘ombudsman’ has been long instated, some governments have ignored his criticism and gotten away with it because they had a parliamentary majority with them. The need for a government to have a majority in parliament is part of the current Danish constitution, but clearly no guarantee that a government may not behave irregularly.

A suggestion may then be that the overseer be given a wider authority but this raises the question of how he/she could be prevented from acting wrongly. Choosing the overseer by direct election does not in itself assure his impartiality and may have to be augmented by more stringent requirements, such as insisting on a spotless record with demonstrated independence from party politics and (at best written) documentation of tolerance and deep knowledge of both laws and the functioning of societies. Rules of fixed duration assignment and no extension should be considered. In the more extreme case where the ombudsman is given the power to oust a government, it would be a very good idea to require the ombudsman himself to subsequently step down and not re-enter politics.

Well-documented examples of changes in human societies can be found in Pharaonic Egypt. Agricultural successes had created luxurious city states with leaders that attained status of gods. This was related to the death culture developed in the region, where even common Egyptians would spend most of their lives to prepare for death and the possible journey to the paradise (located west of Egypt, in the desert), pending upon giving the right answers to entrance questions under guidance from priests and half-gods. How the priesthood invented this intricate system and got acceptance for it remains unclear, but a fact is the strongly hierarchal society with the priests at the top and kings elevated to godly status as Pharaohs. It is therefore remarkable that an attempt to radically change this system was made by the Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti. They combined a successful foreign policy with the (increasingly forced) introduction of a monotheistic religion that removed power from the existing priesthood. However, in the end the attempt failed and the old regime regained their positions of control. Lesson: changes do not always work out!

More success characterises the developments in classical Greece, where the society was much more open to debate than Egypt and the Middle Eastern countries. Struggles over defining democracy have been described in Section 3.2.1. The introduction of democratic governance was made in steps. One may say steps both forward or backward, considering the cases where changes appeared to have gone too far. In Athens, Solon’s first step toward democracy were followed by a direct democracy that developed into a deadly mob rule, but then was modified to keep the positive aspects while avoiding the worst misuse. The rivalling city state of Sparta instead introduced a representative democracy, but in a strange form that also contained elements of Soviet-style forced uniformity. Unfortunately, less written material has survived to describe the Spartan debates that led to this development, compared with the Athenian debates that are generously recorded by writers.

In any case, many of the problems encountered in the Greek wrestling with democracy did resurface in the European Period of Enlightenment, notably during the French revolution that introduced the change through an armed confrontation. These negative events certainly contributed to selecting representative democracy in the United States and also in France once the violence of the revolution had calmed down. These parliamentarian systems soon developed into the party-based version of representative democracy that today has turned into a parody in violation of many of the basic objectives of democracy. The reason this happened is connected with another change happening in Western Europe and its former colonies, namely the introduction of capitalism that basically preferred a dictatorship but increasingly found it manageable to operate under parliamentarian democracy, as long as it could be done through political parties that the financial world was able to control or at least strongly influence. This of course became worse when neo-liberalism appeared on the scene, because as discussed earlier, this variant of capitalism has the demolition of some basic rules of democracy as a basic goal.

The alternative approach of Marxism discussed in Section 3.2 was adapted in Russia and later China, but in a form based on oligarchy or plain dictatorship (Stalin, Mao). Here, the change required a revolution, a conclusion that Marx also had come to, but in Russia introduced with relatively little violence. The Bukunin alternative that developed into European Social Democracies also required a degree of violence, for example between workers’ unions and police, but eventually became a vehicle for improving social conditions in most European countries. The high point was probably the introduction of the Scandinavian welfare economies that survived through most of the 20th century despite the Youth Revolt in 1968, dissatisfied with the stagnation of the power distribution in society. Yet the “Americanization” that had started after World War II continued using its advertising tools to penetrate into European consumer preferences and gradually also took over the political scene, where election debates were turned into media shows. As a result, the introduction of neo-liberalism (first in England by Margaret Thatcher and in the United States by Ronald Reagan) went rather unnoticed and unchallenged by a large part of the populations. Party politics had already reduced political debate to media advertising and shows conducted by the party leaders that in some cases were selected for their looks and charming talk or at least had been sent to courses trying to teach them such qualifications.

What would be required for introducing some of the changes suggested in this book? Could it be done through informed debate? Are revolutions still possible? Well, they seemed to be in Libya and Egypt recently, but in the end did not lead to new democracies. Anticipating the criticism that many of the new ideas are not new but were part of the earlier debates as well, a criticism that is well founded, one may first reply that this does not make the suggestions less useful, and secondly that their introduction would not constitute a return to some of the ideologies that we see as having failed. Looking at the manifest of Marx and Engels and the Social Democratic programs described in Sections 3.2 and 2.3.3, one notes that many of the objectives have actually been (or are being) implemented, although not uniformly over all countries calling themselves democratic and particularly not in the countries ruled by religious fundamentalism. This includes:

The first seven of these implemented (although not universally, and for point 2 in some cases again abandoned) points appeared in the Communist Manifesto and points 7–13 in the Tour program of the French Social Democrats, while points 5 and 14–16 are from the Scandinavian Welfare Programs. Not yet implemented, but part of the additions seen as necessary from the argumentation made in this book, are:

Of these not-yet implemented changes, the first three were originally suggested by the socialists and the last two by the social democrats. Point 21 requires a reflection on the preservation of cabinet responsibility (that governments should have a majority in parliaments) versus parliament members bound only by their conscience. In the United States, it is accepted that the president and his/her government does not always have a majority in the two parliaments, while in Europe this is not always the case.

In principle, implementing the additions should be possible by peaceful means. It will receive opposition from existing political parties and their backers in industry and financial institutions, but it is for instance difficult to see that governments could not as well have decided to use taxpayer’s money to bail the financial sector out with the condition of assuming the control required for making the changes, that are argued in this book to be necessary. If, on the other hand, a revolution turns out to be required, one should worry about the militarization of society involved. A civil war is not the ideal starting point for a new paradigm that includes abolishing wars and weapons. Currently, police have been seen using militant techniques to quench peaceful protests in several countries, governments are using the media to promote their side of the story and to suppress other views, and in some cases (notably in Latin America), the military has on several occasions taken over power. In all these situations, nonviolent resolution of the issues is much to be preferred, but this option has often been deselected, and usually by the established power rather that by the movements for change. Once reforms have been implemented in some countries desiring to establish or return to democracy, it will be easier to spread them to the remaining parts of the world, notably with use of a reinforced international institution of the United Nations type and by applying nonviolent methods such as trade and travel embargos, plus rewards for complying, before as a last resort, military intervention is contemplated.