Economics Again.

Well Radio 4 has just hosted a lecture by a famous economist, Richard Kean, who outlined his new ideas to get us out of this mess, i.e. Variable Income Pricing, which, yes, you heard here first on Stiffmouse. Buoyed up by this coupe I’ll go further. Richard talked of Darwin as an economist, that natural selection, though it could favour the individual or the species, chooses to favour the species. In other words where slightly bigger breasts might favour an individual female’s capacity to attract a male partner evolution hasn’t allowed them to continue to grow to the size of weather balloons because copulation would become impossible lying on a bouncy pair of Space Hoppers. So evolution is directed towards the benefit of the species not the individual. Now it’s widely recognised the rich/poor income ratio has grown out of hand lately and our system has mutated towards favouring individuals, and that regulation of some sort is needed. But what sort of regulation? Currently as the best salaries are paid to the regulated it likely they will find ways around regulation put in place by the less well-paid regulators. So we can’t keep these horses in by regulatory fences. What we can do is create rules that are in the brightest minds best interests to follow, i.e. the brighter they are the better they will follow them. Where a strong horse will jump out of a square coral it will run to its hearts content between two circular fences. Variable Income Pricing is a case in point. Another more subtle approach might be to enforce a simple rule that one must take a day’s holiday for every £2,000 worth of income. That way not only would high earners become increasingly non-productive, they would have an increasing amount of leisure time to find a better meaning to their life. These type rules attempt to bend the economic trajectory of all layers of society towards the common good rather than building more and more complex fences that will inevitably be jumped. Then of course there’s electric fences. I wonder how they would work out?