The economic system, Just Deserts, is not a centrally planned economy, but instead the opposite of it, with two major exceptions. One is that there are a multitude of rules and regulations to prevent the bane of all other economic systems from functioning and bringing in corruption and nepotism to an otherwise moral society. That is the Power Feedback Loop. The second is that there is a moral code which is above the concept of human rights. In other words, any particular human right cannot be exercised in violation of the moral code. That human right prevails in all other circumstances, and cannot be denied. The actions of both those in positions of some sort, in government at some level, in corporations or companies or any other organization, and of those operating as individuals, must be subject to first the moral code and second to the prescribed list of human rights and their explication in controversial situations.
The media, as well as the education and entertainment sectors of the economy, would be allowed to function however the individuals involved chose. In other words, the structure of a new media type can be done however those designing it want, provided these basic limitations are respected. It would be foolhardy to try and restrict the development of new technology, as that relates to the productivity of the society and therefore directly to the standard of living.
Media is composed of individuals, companies and corporations. To prevent the wretched operation of the Power Feedback Loop, certain regulations might be put in place. First, the rule that applies to all companies and corporations, that taxation rates increase with market share, becoming prohibitive for anything approaching a monopoly, needs to be in force here as well as everywhere else. This is designed to ensure that one means by which the Power and Wealth Feedback Loops typically operate, by the successive takeover of smaller parties in the sector by one or a few large and dominant ones, will be taxed into impossibility. If necessary in some context, taxation will be negative, so that profits from a near-monopoly will flow to small competitors in the same sector. This means no single or handful of companies will be able to dominate the media, just as with other sectors.
As noted elsewhere, for every regulation put in place to prevent the Power Feedback Loop from squashing competition, there will be well-funded actions by potential oligopolists to devise a counterstrategy that will allow them to circumvent the regulation. Another of the tools in Just Deserts is transparency. That means that financial transparency will be uniformly required, but since is it clear that ownership is simply a label and control is what is important, there must be an equivalent in control as well. Then there must be mechanisms to prevent any accumulation of control tending to a monopoloy or oligopoly. Many will be necessary as the goal is to overcome a feedback loop which has dominated every society for the last several millennia.
One is the mandatory rotation of executive positions in corporations and companies. The corporations will all be employee-owned, and there must be some process for rotating individuals in and out of powerful positions on as frequent an interval as can be managed. This will involve having training positions for replacements, perhaps two, so that a sequence of executives will be waiting in line for every position, as the time limit expires. Associated with this will be some method of choosing people to put in these preparatory positions. It might be a combination of competitive examinations, lotteries, and franchised voting, together with other mechanisms yet to be devised. Large companies will also be subject to such or similar rules of position rotation.
It does no good to remove someone from a position if they can still control the person who is in it. In other words, the Power Feedback Loop will drive people in executive positions to become figureheads, while the major decisions are made by others, not subject to the replacement time limit. Consider a corporation with a president, and a chief of staff who is not rotating in and out. The chief of staff would soon become the power behind the president, and the fancy mechanisms for replacing the president will have been overcome by the Power Feedback Loop. It would be the same if there was no single chief of staff controlling decisions, or it this position was subject to rotation, and instead there was a committee of advisors who were not rotating in and out. As time progressed, these advisors would potentially become subject to the persuasive abilities of the most dominant of their members, and this particular individual would become the effective decision-maker for large decisions. One potential remedy is to ensure that all advisors, chiefs of staff, department heads, and other positions at executive level are subject to the same rotation rules. This means that there would be a large overhead in people in training, but that would be the cost of avoiding the concentration of power.
In media companies and corporations, there is a double set of those executives who might be impelled to try and become more and more personally powerful, over long periods. One set manages the company, and another set manages the products of the company. Both need to be monitored for concentrations of power, and the same devices used in a company for executive positions need to be used for both the executive positions within the media company or corporation, and those heading creative departments, or departments which control content. The lust for control which strikes individuals can manifest itself as a corporate management pathology, but also as a pathology for controlling what the various audiences think, or how they form opinions, or what ideas they assume without validation to be true. Division of power is another way to debilitate those who want to be the controllers of large number of individual’s thought processes. If the media products are fractionated, and different groups given responsibility for percentages of them, unless there is some mechanism by which one person dictates his standards to all of them, there would be a serious limitation on how monolithic the concepts that the audience was being indoctrinated with could be.
Education is another of the same type. If education is concentrated in a few hands, then the Power Feedback Loop would have won, and these few people would be able to indoctrinate entire generations of individuals. This sector of the economy is even more powerful and more desirable for control by those with that unquenchable desire. Someone indoctrinated at an early age, anywhere from the first schooling at an early age up to the final, even professional, education, keeps those opinions, possibly for life, or until some major event in their lives causes them to question what they think they have learned. The same tools used for media disablement of the Power Feedback Loop should be used for educational institutions, both those who directly educate, but even more so, those who set standards about what should be propagated within the different levels of the educational system. But there is also another tool, well-known and usually misunderstood: critical thinking. The principal goal of the higher levels of education must be first and foremost not career preparation, but critical thinking. ‘Critical thinking’ is a label that is plastered on almost every process of teaching, but there is little actual critical thinking within curricula today. There needs to be a distillation of what these skills, critical thinking and creativity as well, actually are and how to teach them and how to test them. There would need to be some agency, independent or inside the government, or perhaps several competing ones, which would act to overturn the teaching methodologies which falsely label themselves as ‘critical thinking’, and make it clear to everyone in the education process exactly what these techniques were and how they can be explained. ‘Critical thinking’ does not mean adhering to some prescribed set of sloganized beliefs, but having almost no beliefs other than those which have been discovered to be true by the individuals involved. It is much, much harder to learn than memorization of facts and concepts, but it is necessary as a foundation for a Just Deserts economic system. It is possible to invent regulations to prevent the Power Feedback Loop from corrupting the society in is embedded in, but having a population educated well enough to be skeptical of what they are told, and know how to follow up on that skepticism is even more robust in preventing complex and disguised means of corruption.
A key part of critical thinking is knowing the methods of scientific investigation, and also a collection of mathematical skills. If these are taught, then those seeking power over others for psychological reasons would have a much more difficult time having an effect on their audiences, whether in education or in media and entertainment. One of the human rights to be considered within a Just Deserts system is education in critical thinking, including scientific methods of inquiring about anything, and the mathematical skills necessary to evaluate claims and pretenses, and to know when a scam is being perpetrated. Having these skills widespread in the community is possibly the best barrier against corruption than can be devised in any economic system.
Uneducated Economics 