Theory may sound esoteric, but thinking is theorizing. Everything we do is based on our theories, that is, how we understand the world in terms of causes and effects. By the germ theory of disease we understand disease as caused by invading germs. By the atomic theory of matter we understand the chemical world as elements forming compounds by specific combinations of electrons. We organize and take action by how our theories explain the world to us.

The theory in this book explains how we produce wealth. It was developed by weaving "golden threads" from across the social sciences and people like Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Talcott Parsons, and many others.

The central idea of the theory is that wealth depends on the scale of cooperation, which in turn depends on how far people can communicate information person to person to person to person in "information chains."

That idea led to understanding spoken language as the high volume-short distance medium of communication, to understanding writing as the middle volume-middle distance medium of communication, then numbers and the metric system as lower volume-longer distance media of communication. Naturally, that raised the question, What about money? It has all the features of a medium of communication in being words and numbers printed on paper or recorded as impulses in computers.

Thinking of money as a medium of communication led to realizing that money is operating without a unit of measure. It's like having a metric system with no definition of the length of a meter. Money, centrally important to modern life, remains incomplete, its unit undefined, indefinite, vague, ambiguous, uncertain, unstable. Internationally, monies are a Tower of Babel, dollars, yen, rupees, pesos, lira, and on and on. Who can say with confidence what any of them is worth? No wonder prices are so uncertain and variable. No wonder "economics" is so difficult to understand.

Defining the exact length of a meter, and making it the world standard of length, resulted in global harmony in the measurement of length. Similarly, by adopting an hour of work as the world standard for calculating prices, prices will become accurate as never before. Trial and error auction markets will become historical oddities and all the world will experience global harmony in the setting of prices. Fair (price=worktime) prices will mean free trade that is fair trade.

The book is short, 136 pages, as you might expect a book of golden threads to be. Theories need to be parsimonious to be understood and, therefore, helpful in solving problems. In our time, the problem is to transform global disharmony into global harmony. Prices based on work time can do it.

_______________Table of Contents___________________
1 Introduction...............................................................................1
2 Golden Threads.........................................................................3
3 The Wisdom of Weaving..........................................................4
4 Make It A Variable..................................................................11
5 The Purpose of Society and Sociology..................................13
6 Life Expectancy: The Dependent Variable.............................20
7 The Scale of Cooperation: The Intervening Variable............24
8 The Information Chain Length (ICL) Paradigm....................28
9 The Six Independent Variables...............................................32
10 Symbols.................................................................................37
11 Centrality...............................................................................52
12 Codification..........................................................................56
13 Motivation.............................................................................64
14 Population.............................................................................73
15 Technology............................................................................76
16 Testing the Theory.................................................................83
17 Testing Symbols....................................................................86
18 Testing Centrality..................................................................93
19 Testing Codification.............................................................97
20 Testing Motivation................................................................99
21 Testing Population..............................................................112
22 Testing Technology.............................................................115
23 Review.................................................................................117
24 Applications.........................................................................118
25 Cooperation: The Wealth of Nations Game......................126
About the Author......................................................................131

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