Three score years and ten is our allotted span and we don’t really get going until our mid-twenties so 50 years is the best we can plan for. Economics is not good with time. But time is the key because time…not money…is the scarce resource for the little individual. While a graduate student with the System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School in the early 1980s I read a paper entitled Energy: a long wave perspective to the annual conference of the Association of Eastern Economists. The paper was based on some energy system modelling the group were doing. System Dynamic models are good with time…unlike economic models. Economic Systems may have equilibrium states but the real economy oscillates through them and spirals off to new equilibria before the old oscillations settle down.

Real economies are dynamic and not static. The Delay Factors incorporated into System Dynamic models are critical variables. The time factors are often responsible for the real world behaviour the models are designed to create. My MIT work disappeared with my divorce but one of the four energy papers...energy policy...turned up recently. My pet slide in the 1981 Philadelphia presentation included the equation (E = p x e x t). Economic activity (E) takes place when people (p) have the energy (e) and the time (t) to carry it out. This formulation of the economic problem differs from the classical one which ignores time, views energy as a line in the Input-Output Matrix and includes people as a factor of production called Labour…thereby placing it on an equal footing philosophically with Land and Capital.

There is also a crucial difference between Mind Work and Manual Labour. Mind output (knowledge) is not consumed but replicated as it passes from one person to another. Schumacher's Adaequatio Factor and Knowledge Obsolescence should also be factored into the equation. This replication creates islands of Increasing Returns in a sea of Diminishing Returns…and these are central to the theory that Bigger is Better. In fact big is best for capital. And small is better for people. In the real world as economic sea levels fall so islands become continents. Money enters the Pet Formula by way of The Rule of Five as a secondary variable. This encourages The Natural Order as opposed to the classical formulation of the economic problem that has played a key role in Societal Inversion. Reformulating the economic problem more along these lines will be crucial to the recreation of The Natural Order in our societies.

Another way to effect the shift to a Cathedral Culture from a Money Culture is to address the problem of short-termism by caring more…rather than less…about the morrow. The shift to shorter and shorter time frames may be a consequence of the maldistribution of money between different sizes of business enterprise? Size matters. The experience of the Prince of Wales Trust would seem to support this hypothesis.

Small businesses grow organically by serving more customers. Big businesses acquire customers by gobbling up other businesses or by selling more products and services to their existing customers. The Diminishing Utility of each accretion is critical to the Junking Up and Dumbing Down that takes place in Overdeveloped Societies. Bullyboy tactics are also deployed to eliminate smaller competitors. Governments with their Laws against Monopolies and their Offices of Fair Trading are not blind to these problems. They even have some inkling that oligarchy and unfair competition are related to scale. But there is no unified Theory of Scale and Pace to support the development of such sensible policies as graduated tax rates targeted at the size of an enterprise.

The rise and rise of Microsoft on the back of its Share Options and rising share price and the Overdeveloped World’s practice of dumping their surplus and obsolete products are two examples of Big Corporation Behaviour. They call it Best Practice. I call it Murder. People die in droves as a result of Big Corporation Best Practice. In the 1960s the British National Coal Board was the largest business in Europe in terms of the number of households dependent upon the enterprise for their livelihood. This was central to the management of the business but cut little ice with the Pension Fund and Insurance Company managers who have been given a private monopoly over the disposition of spare money and created credit in this country.

Instead Stock Markets glorify Market Capitalization and Annual Turnover irrespective of what they are, where they come from and how many people are involved in generating the numbers. Enron provides a clear warning of the pitfalls of this approach. The notion of productivity is crucial but is badly defined, poorly understood and never integrated into any broader theory of Work and Personal Fulfilment. Besides the only legitimate function of financial markets is to match those who want to exchange twenty pounds today with those wanting a pound a year for twenty years. All other trading on these financial markets should be taxed until the pips of these barrow boys squeak.

Microbusinesses also have a key role to play in re-establishing the natural time-frame for human life and human endeavour. The natural time-span for collective human economic activity is a span of two hundred years from the birth of the oldest family relative alive to the death of the youngest child in the family. Inter-generational family businesses are vital to The Good Society. One day William Franklin & Sons Limited will be seen as a model for such businesses...and in particular for the Transition Mechanism incorporated into the structure of the firm.