Exercising the heart muscle of the 21st century economy.
Micro Ecomomics: The output of labor and materials organized on a small scale that harnesses the innovation, effort and intimate customer understanding of individuals operating in micro marketplaces.
Micro economics is a central plank on the material infrastructure platform of the Standards of LIFE. In our search for sustainable prosperity we need to recognize that the structure of today’s modern economic systems is failing to capture the true output capability of our societies. There is huge latent economic capacity woven into the fabric of our individual needs and individual capabilities.
The orientation of societies towards the needs of capital-intensive economic units erodes our ability to harness the economic capacity of individual and small scale contribution. Additionally, the overreliance on these large economic units creates an unbalanced economy overly prone to the swings and roundabouts of market sentiment. (Please do not mistake this understanding for a Luddite repudiation of capitalist enterpise – for more details see Enterprise.) The economic mass of micro-production is vastly more resilient and sustainable because it meets needs more efficiently, more appropriately and can service the most fundamental markets of our societies.
To gain the maximum satisfaction from economic activity, it is necessary for a society to enable the flourishing of micro economic markets. This is not to stand against the capital orientated corporations but simply to prioritize economic effort in favor of activity and infrastructure that generates the highest returns to society.
There are two precursors to the establishment of a micro economic model:
- that the basic needs of citizens are met through a social contract and, therefore,
- there is no (need for a) minimum wage.
Adopting the social support system of BASE provides the necessary underpinning to micro economics, while removing the false delineation of measuring economically productive activity solely by participation in the capital intensive macro economy. The BASE system obviates the need for a minimum wage and frees economic entities from trying to substitute for society’s responsibilities.
In prioritizing micro economic activity, it is the function of government to create and support the infrastructure that enables individual economic effort, by providing the non-organizing capital support that only the greater society can provide. The most basic infrastructure needed to support microeconomics is in the area of communications and marketplace development. This means providing modern technology to enable the joining of the myriad of individual needs with a myriad of individual suppliers. The next most important infrastructure contribution, is a facilitated transport architecture that allows for the flow of people, goods and ideas.
It sounds simple, but the impact of providing the communications architecture that enables micro economic markets will have a dramatic and immediate boost to overall economic output, social cohesion and worldwide satisfaction. The capacity to enable marketplaces, where individual needs can find individual suppliers ,has never been greater and it is in all of our interests that this facility be made universally available. This requires capital investment beyond the capability of each of the individual participants, but well within the reach of our societies, and so it falls within the domain of our governments to coordinate and implement the infrastructure.
By focusing investment in these basic infrastructure needs, with an eye to enabling micro economic activity, we can unleash a cornucopia of economic production that will greatly enrich our individual lives, our societies and simultaneously encourage sustainable, resilient and flourishing communities.
Leveraging information to create exchanges and marketplaces, it is first necessary to ensure that all citizens have access to those exchanges and marketplaces. This means creating and sustaining a communications infrastructure with a universal reach — much in the same way as the Post Office enabled the communications so vital to the industrial revolution of the late 19th century.
The technology and standards necessary to create a universal communications architecture are already present and enabled in the form of the Internet. So governments’ role is simply to enable universal access and to strive for the highest quality and greatest security.
The communications infrastructure effectively becomes a vital, strategic resource to the society that it serves and, as such, it makes every sense that that infrastructure should be publicly owned. The establishment of a far-reaching optical fiber network, complemented by high-speed wireless infrastructure, will benefit every community, region, state, continent and the whole world. See Information & Technology for more details.
The purpose of having a universal communications infrastructure is to enable easy access to the information that allows micro economic activity to flourish. Every community, region, state, transterritory and even the whole world, harbors a multitudinous multiplicity of individual needs and if those needs can be advertised through a marketplace, it allows the myriad skills and capabilities of the same populace to find and meet those needs.
Provisioning these micro economic marketplaces is one of the most powerful and beneficial services that any government, at any level, can provide for the people and society that they serve. Never before in the field of human endeavor as so much economic interaction been so possible.
It is important to establish and adhere to the principle that information collected by the government on behalf of the people, about the people, belongs to the people. Of course information about a person belongs to that person and the privacy of the individual must not only be respected but also protected. However statistical information about the society and the environment we live in should be publicly accessible, especially impactful is when such information can help to ferment micro economic activity. See also Information.
There is no doubt that much of the micro economic activity will be transacted through the barter system rather than the traditional cash monetary system. Those of conventional mind will no doubt leap up and exclaim in erudite language that these transactions will bypass the taxation system and rob society of valuable revenues. But that fails to take into account that, most likely, a huge portion of the micro economic activity exchanged using barter would either not have existed before at all or will be for services that the government would otherwise have been providing as part of the social contract (e.g. child and elderly care, clothing). The net result will be a reduction in the cash cost of the provision of basic social services (BASE) which will in turn have a positive impact on reducing the tax burden on all income taxpayers.
See also “Sustainable Economics”
Wikipedia, formal definition of "microeconomics", which is a little different than how it is used here