Democratising the Wealth of Nations

Published in 1975 by The Company Directors Association of Australia featuring a complentary title of "New money sources and profit motives"

This book introduces three techniques for democratising the wealth of nations. The three techniques: Ownership Transfer Corporations (OTCs), Cooperative Land Banks (CLBs) and Producer-Consumer Cooperatives (PCCs), like Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOPs), transfer wealth without taxes or welfare to allow the extent of taxes, welfare and the size of government to be reduced. Unlike ESOPs, the three techniques systemically democratise wealth by replacing static, exclusive and perpetual property rights with dynamic, inclusive and time limited rules of ownership. In this way a more efficient, equitable and participatory economic system can be created described as Social Capitalism. The Credo of Social Capitalism being: From each according to their interest; To each according to their contribution; Provided the basic needs of all are fulfilled. Differences between economists and business people in describing the nature and meaning of wealth are explained along with the non monetary value wealth. Also explained is why employees and professionals stay poor and how corporations concentrate wealth in a manner that is not reported by accountants. The book explains how wealth can be gained from inflation but this is limited by the ability of society to create wealth from production. The introduction of dynamic property rights could be used to create a community dividend to replace welfare to allow governments to replace full employment policies with a policy of fulfilment from work and/or leisure.

Economic Development of Aboriginal Communities in the Northern Territory

First published in two parts as Australian Parliamentary Papers, Impact of mining royalties in the Northern Territory, First report, 135, October 1977 and Economic Development of Aboriginal Communities in the Northern Territory, Second report: Self-sufficiency (with land rights) 438/June 1978.

Building Sustainable Communities: Tools and Concepts for Self-Reliant Economic Change

Co-authored with C. George Benello, Robert Swann,  Ed. Ward Morehouse.  First published 1989, revised 1997

About the book - from back cover:

A revised edition of a classic work long out of print, this book is based on the Schumacher Society Seminars on Community Economic Transformation. It presents the underlying ideas and essential institutions for building sustainable communities. The three Major sections of the book deal with community land trusts and other forms of community ownership of natural resources; worker-managed enterprises, and other techniques of community self-management; and community currency and banking. Included also are a lexicon of social capitalism and a bibliography of key words on self-reliant economic change.

A New Way to Govern: Organisations and society after Enron

Published as a New Economics Foundation "Pocket Book No 6., London, 2002

This pocketbook was commissioned to identify ways for avoiding the unexpected failure of large publicly traded enterprises and overcoming the shortcomings in government, and/or privatised organisations. It describes the fundamental problems of organisational hierarchies in either the public or private sectors to perform effectively and reliably with the ever-increasing complexity and dynamism in modern societies. Network organisations with multiple control centres or boards are identified as providing requisite variety of information and control channels to flexibly govern complexity. Provided self-governing network organisations are kept to human scale they reduce information overload and bounded rationality. The division of power into a number of centres introduces checks and balances to facilitate self-governance and allows individuals to act in a contrary way that are inhibited in command and control hierarchies. The ability of individuals to be competitive/cooperative, suspicious/trusting, self-interested/altruistic and so on introduces natures' check and balances to efficiently introduce self-regulation. Competition for excellence arises from contestability for control within organisations rather than between organisations through the market place to harness the self-interest of executives to further the public good. Networks of network organisations achieve economies of scale and scope, provided that no higher level network undertakes activities that are better carried out by a lower level self-governing unit. This principle of subsidiary function is illustrated by the nested networks that make up the stakeholder control enterprises around the town of Mondragon in Northern Spain that operate more efficiently that investor owned firms. Like a mutual enterprise the Mondragon firms do not require equity investors.