About this book - Foreseeing a solution: The problem of world economy, poverty and environment.
The world’s environmental and economic crises have been analyzed from a great many different points of view. In this book, the author presents to us a totally different and original perspective, a snapshot taken from the angle of his areas of specialty: mathematics, computers and a plain, down-to-earth, practical problem-solving ability acquired after 40 plus years of experience in engineering and entrepreneurship.
However, do not fret about being bombarded with figures, mathematical equations and academic jargon. The subject is treated in plain language which any intelligent reader can understand without any previous knowledge on technical fields, not even on Economics. Scientific and economic principles are invoked throughout the whole essay but they are explained in simple terms, usually using analogies and numerous real-life examples, as in the case of the phenomena of Negative and Positive Feedback, observed in nature, which constitute the core and underlying argument of this book.
Negative Feedback, for instance, is the scientific principle which allows a plane to fly with autopilot, our body to keep an upright vertical position or a community of trees to grow to approximate similar heights thus forming a forest. Positive Feedback, on the other hand, is observed in almost all the destructive processes of nature: atomic explosions, viral and bacterial infections in our bodies and even stock-price collapses in the stock market.
This book calls upon all these principles of nature and explains why Positive Feedback, when mixed together with a laissez-faire capitalistic economy such as the one the whole world is practicing now, a self-destructive, explosive condition is the unavoidable result.
The author claims that Positive Feedback, being a mathematical law, cannot be denied using political arguments. He claims that the only thing that our civilization can do in order to survive is to gradually remove it from our economy replacing it step by step by Negative Feedback processes and systems.
The book contains four different sections. The first section is an introductory explanation of the whole book and a recount of the author’s ordeal when living in Nicaragua under the pro-Communist Sandinista regime, when he was Engineering Manager of an international chemical corporation and had to struggle with a Sandinista Labor Union which grabbed the control of the whole company, even intruding in technical, industrial-safety and disciplinary areas. His experience is a first-hand account of how a profitable, efficient enterprise was brought to ruin in just a few years, same as thousands of other businesses in Nicaragua. It is as a consequence of these experiences that the author expresses so much aversion to Communist methods. You will read about hereto unpublished, unimaginable things that were perpetrated in the name of a betrayed Revolution.
The second section, titled “The Ugly Side of the Coin”, describes the problem of our world situation from an intentionally pessimistic viewpoint. It depicts the worldwide scenario from a wide variety of negative angles simply with the purpose of establishing in the reader’s mind the idea that “There actually is a problem and it needs to be solved”. But, at the same time, the author introduces the concept of Super Incentives as a feasible way out of the economic labyrinth.
The third section, “The Problem at Hand”, tries to explain how Positive Feedback and many other noxious principles have invaded our economic processes. It is an exhaustive, step by step denunciation of the economic aberrations that plague our lives. The author “peels the economic onion” in no less than 28 different layers, where he brings forth each and every one of those aberrations to light for the reader’s examination. All this is done with the sole purpose of hammering down the fact –once again– that not everything is rose-colored under our Savage-Capitalistic way of life…and much less under a Communist one.
Finally PART II of the book, “What can be Done”, is where the actual proposition of this treatise is brought forward for the first time. The author reverses the angle of the picture and presents to us a totally positive scenario, abounding on original viewpoints and practical steps to be taken. He stresses the point that our Planet has a mind of its own and this mind is hiddenly pushing our whole civilization toward its resurgence.
In the author’s own words, “Man is reinventing himself in order to adapt to a changing environment… if man learns how to control his unlimited greed, if he learns how to be frugal again… in a few words, if he learns how to implement negative-feedback processes in his economy, then a thousand doors would open unto him”.
Foreseeing a solution to the problems of world economy, absolute poverty and the environment, a book that is meant to cause controversy.
