Economic Governance Technology

About the Book

Economic Governance Technology was written with not only the belief, but also a sense of certainty, that insights and tools provided by modern science and technology, combined with basic human values and basic logic, will allow the creation of a new economic governance technology. This technology will make it possible to build efficient and productive economies, ensuring full employment and a fair distribution of wealth – all without having to go through depressions, major recessions, or large fluctuations in the interest rate. Moreover, all this can be done even amid major shifts in technology, natural disasters, and epidemics. Peter G. Hammerschlag, a mechanical engineer with a large variety of experience in the real economy of making goods and providing services, in large companies and in small companies, outlines such a technology in this book. He does so using basic, practical language that even the lay person can grasp. The ideas he presents can be viewed initially as an additional branch of economics. However, they will eventually make substantial parts of present-day economics obsolete. This new technology, when fully developed, will make it possible to monitor, guide and, when needed, control an economy for the benefit of all, ensuring productivity, full employment, a fair distribution of wealth, and sufficient allocation of resources to public services and preparations for the future.

About the Author

After acquiring a mechanical engineering degree (MSc) with additional scientific emphasis, including working one year as a research assistant, at the Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, Peter G. Hammerschlag worked for large companies like The Boeing Company and Ingersoll-Rand Corporation, a number of smaller companies and his own consulting firm, mostly in the USA. His work involved design of a large variety of machinery and equipment, in later years also with computer controls, in areas such as marine deck equipment, airplane mechanical systems, mining, logging, saw mill, paper mill and industrial automation machinery. This included managing projects, organizing manufacturing, start-up of equipment and troubleshooting. He considers his main achievement to be that there are hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment around the world, designed or redesigned by him, or under his supervision, that are doing an excellent job. He is a Registered Professional Mechanical Engineer in the State of Washington, USA, and a Life Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. His technical work gave him also extensive exposure to and experience in business management, cost estimating and other financial aspects, meeting regulation and code requirements, pursuing research and development, patenting (holder of five USA patents) and providing expert testimony. Further, since his high school classes in governance and economics, he has been interested in those subjects and did later major self-study on them. Thus, he could combine what he learned from the literature in these areas with what he observed and learned from being in the middle of the real world of economic activities. Being at the “periphery” of the world of economic study and not being trapped in one or more of its “group thinks”, has made it easier for him to see the reality and conceive innovations. He was born and raised in the Netherlands, but spent most of his adult life in the USA. He feels that his multicultural background helped him also recognize the essence of many issues. This insight contributed to the proposals made in this book, which he hopes will help usher in a new stage of human progress in economic governance, based on systematic study, basic human values, and basic logic.