"From Profits ... To Prosperity"

Retired electrical engineer Darwen Cook of Chico wondered some years ago what would happen if economics was viewed from an engineering perspective. "Economics," he writes, "had no cohesive guiding principles like the other sciences that I studied and used for engineering." Worse, he says, economists focus on profits rather than prosperity. What would happen if all that changed?

His answer is detailed in a comprehensive set of recommendations that is at the same time a manifesto for an Economic Humanist Party movement. Cook calls his idea "economic engineering," an approach "based on axiomatic principles and human rights intended to achieve maximum economic prosperity for the vast majority of all humanity sustained indefinitely."

"From Profits ... To Prosperity: Blueprint For A Democratic Humanistic Economy" ($19.95 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle) is written in the form of proposed legislation Cook dubs the Humanist Economic Reform Act (HERA). 

It's informed by the Economic Bill of Rights, which Cook says is implied in the U.S. Constitution. Key rights include "the right to equal valued pay for equal valued work," "the freedom from the oppression of an economic privileged class," and "the right to a living wage sufficient to achieve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"I have reformulated Capitalism," Cook writes, "as a democratic, axiomatic, mathematical system. I call this reformulation 'Humanism.'" The axioms act like a kind of Euclidean geometry for economics. They are not the product ofeconomics but rather introduced from the outside (by an engineer) to guideeconomics. 

The first, for example, maintains that "the fundamental reason our economy exists is to serve humanity in facilitating the worker/consumer duality by achieving maximum prosperity for the vast majority of mankind." It recognizes that humans shouldn't be treated as commodities "such as zinc or soybeans .... This axiom ends the possibility of economic slavery once and for all!"

His proposal involves expanding the Federal Reserve into a fourth branch of government, called the independent Economic Control Authority, and the replacement of Social Security with a "National Fund payroll deduction plan" to increase retirement benefits. 

What if the economy were engineered for human prosperity? Here, at least, is one man's answer.