Impossible to fix the economy?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8702883.stm

Former MP Chris Mullen spent a long time, it says here, trying NOT to have a ministerial car. Now with government cutbacks happening, it seems like a good idea to reduce the amount of chauffeuring round of ministers, except that they work while they're being driven, so provided the price of car and driver is less than the price of the work done while being chauffeured, we're OK.

Here's the thing. The chauffeurs get low wages and rely on overtime to make up their money, so they want more chauffeuring to do. Some ministers, sympathetic to the low wage situation, actually contrive(-d) to get more work or the chauffeurs. Right - we're getting work done that doesn't need doing at all (unnecessary extra chauffeuring) so that the chauffeurs can get more money. It would make more sense just to pay them more in the first place.

But we still have the problem that the chauffeurs want more work to get more money, and the government wants to spend less money. These two are plainly incompatible and an example of a common problem.

In this case, we have an activity that [arguably] needs doing - moving people from where they are to where they need to be on time and in an environment where they can still be productive. Working on the assumption that the thing needs doing (and is not just being done so people can be paid for it) we need to consider the options of reducing the need to do it and/or using technology to do it so that people don't have to (we don't want to create work for humans just so that we have an excuse to pay them, we want humans to do things for the benefit of humanity (see 'People Need Jobs" on this blog for an explanation).

It would seem to be incredibly complex to optimise the whereabouts of many people so that they are in the same physical location at the same time as others they need to be with. One imagines a network of mobile offices, where in each someone constantly works, whilst the system moves them around in so that they are in the right location relative to others for their meeting. Of course it doesn't matter if they are moving all the time while working alone, but they would have to have enough working alone time for the movements to happen.

The one imagines video conferencing. Why isn't that happening more? But if it was abundant, would there still be meetings in the flesh, by choice? It seems likely.

In this scenario, we may need a further level of abstraction. What are thes politicians doing and why are they having the meetings? the Zeitgeist Movement and Venus project that I am advocating and whose principles I am trying to apply would say that we don't need politicians - only scientists. In systems terms why try to optimise the subsystem (politics / political government) rather than the parent system, which we may be sub-optimising. Peter Joseph, I think would test this for a 'physical referent'. What physical thing is going to happen as a result of the minister going to the meeting?