Saving Energy Resources

In an ideal world, we could reduce the energy costs of moving ourselves and the objects that we use or consume by doing less moving and consuming.

1. We eat too much. Reduce our food consumption and we can make big savings.
2. We commute too far. Reduce the commute to and from work by say working at home more, we can reduce family costs and company costs, and reduce travel accidents.
3. We don't get enough exercise and recreation. By cycling more and locating in places that are more suitable for living, we can greatly improve our health and reduce the costs of the health services. Less time mixing with others in a commute reduces the opportunity for down times resulting from the spreading of disease. By not commuting, we would save time that could be used in recreation.
4. We bypass bad places. If we located closer to where we had a real interest in the environment, we would not bypass the bad places of our environment. We would see them and we would want to clean them up because they are near where we occupy space.

Commuting to Work Electronically

Before companies go willy nilly locating in foreign places to reduce their costs, they should ask whether they are located in the right place locally. By reducing the costs of commuting for their employees, companies can alter the family economics of their employees. One way that companies can alter the economics of the credit crunch is to think about helping their employees ride the credit storm. This does nothing to alter the physical costs of commuting and the wasted energy of driving to and from work.

There are a growing number of technologies that firms can now use that would allow employees to work from their homes or from places closer to home. We have seen how the Nintendo Wii allows a child to manipulate an image on a screen by moving an controller up and down. It would seem that there is now technology sufficient to allow people to carry out actions robotically even though they might not be located in the work place. For example, a person could move things in a central location even though they are located remotely. By visually be able to see things electronically at a distance they can set in motion processes that are controlled at a distance. The economics of this is improving steadily.

Reducing Wasted Energy Resources by Relocation of Firms

After watching the mass destruction of homes in the hurricane allies of world, we should consider assisting those living in these areas to move to safer locations and the businesses located in these areas to be ones that are more suited to a harsh environment.

People want to locate near to where they work and earn a living. It seems ridiculous for industries to locate in regions that are very likely to be swamped by sea water.

While there is a housing and credit crisis, it might be appropriate for authorities to encourage firms to locate in safe areas and design bases of industry that get the mathematics of commuting closer to what employees need as compared to what employers need.

What happens frequently is that the employees of a firm have to bear the 'hidden' costs of commuting and damage by nature when these costs could be reduced significantly by a better choice of location by the employer.

To get the employer to pay up, one needs to ask that employers cover a significant portion of commuting and home insurance costs of their employees.

Do firms consider the costs that their employees must bear to work at the location the employer chooses for locating the work place?

A Proposal to Tax Commuter Travel

My proposal is that employers pay a significant proportion of the costs of their employees moving to and from work each day. I think that this tax would alter the way employers view commuting time.

A variant on my tax proposal is that the distance of each persons commute to and from work be provided to the local municipality and the municipality be able to charge people for using the roads going to and from work. This would help recover some of the economic cost of people using fuel on the roads as they commute to and from work.

The benefit of the tax if sufficiently punitive would be to alter the way that people think of their environment. If you lived closer to where you work, you would think more about improving that area of the community to make it more pleasant. As it now stands, people will drive past slums and think nothing about how to improve the lot of the people living in those slums. This is at the root of inequalities within our environment.

We wonder why people live in bad areas, and we know that it is because they are poor. The problem is that skilled people bypass the poor areas and bypass improving the lot of people they could be helping. They bypass because they commute to work. If one reduces commuting, one forces people to think more about average neighbourhoods and give incentives of people in neighbourhoods to improve them because they must endure them all the time.

A World at the Cross Roads

Habit persistence is a known phenomenon. It governs what economists refer to as the consumption function, which is a mathematical representation of our behaviour. Even if we move away temporarily from what we thinks good, correct and right, we tend to ratchet back to earlier patterns of behaviour.

Fundamental changes in the way we do things come not from within ourselves but from the environment around us that force us or lead us to new behaviour. If the environment were like us, and predisposed the way we are to copy cat behaviours and to habit persistence, then we would be in a stable equilibrium world. Fact is our environment changes and we change as a response to our environment. Only difficulty is that our environment is not moving in the direction of change that it should be moving in. This means that we are having to adapt to a world that is full of hidden dangers that our weakness in choosing appropriate technologies have created.

There is a way that we can have some control over our behaviour and that is through making the correct technological decisions that eventually feed back into our environment. I am of the opinion that technological innovation and thus our behaviours have been stifled by the inability of human beings as a sufficiently large group to make the correct technological decisions. This means that societies tend to persist in their bad behaviours and it becomes extremely difficult for individuals of societies to move towards improved behaviours.

The world is at a technological crossroad. We are being offered the opportunity to redirect change towards good and wholesome technologies. I have no faith in the process because those people who define the most appropriate directions are being ignored or vilified while those that ratchet us back to habitual and bad behaviours are almost worshiped as saviours. It does not take a very high intelligence to understand that we need to move towards an enormous restructuring of our between work and home habitat travel.

We have technologies that could reduce travel between work and home, but we are persisting in continuing the twice daily mass movement of bodies to and from locations that are in many cases enormous, but in most cases could be greatly reduced.

What if a limit were imposed that forced people to live close to work if their physical bodies were needed at the workplace? What if employers were required to pay for peoples' travel costs to and from work? That would force a big change on our wasting of resources travelling between home and work.

Ok! My proposal is that a law be passed that requires employers to pay one third of the cost of peoples' commute to and from work each day.

The Importance of Linkages Between Financial and Real Markets

It is sometimes easy for those in the financial world earning salaries in excess of one million pounds sterling to forget crucial linkages that define the success or failure of specific issues of financial instruments, whatever their role. These linkages are bridges between the real and financial economies. It seems that in the current credit crisis, many financial managers have forgotten that the main goal of a central bank is to ensure that inflation is kept in check. This role almost certainly ensures that incomes are also kept in check and with that the profitability of companies. It means that actual financial income growth correlates very closely with non inflationary growth in the real sector. The bottom line is that real incomes need to grow if finacial incomes are to grow and if financial incomes get out of line with real incomes a correction is almost certainly going to happen.