The Unofficial Stelo
For Lawrence Mee the ideas of Dr. Hartl were not dead. He and his wife had long used the Stelo in the bookkeeping for their business Mondkomercista Eldonejo Esperantista (an Esperanto-language trade publisher). After his departure from the Universal League he tried to apply Dr. Roelofs's currency values, but quickly concluded that the data on the purchasing power of the Stelo were erroneous. From the mid-1980s he began to collect statistical data on inflation in various countries, gaining the unexpected support of an economics instructor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The instructor had a great interest in Mee's work. An honorary member of the library at Erasmus University, Mee occupied much of his free time in researching statistical data on the 25 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Mee worked out the unofficial value of the Stelo in those 25 countries, using as his point of departure 1 January 1977, the day on which the Stelo's fixed purchasing power was defined. He discovered that the Universal League formula was certainly wrong for the Netherlands; he presumed that it was wrong for other countries also, although he did not yet have proof of this.
The progress of Mee's research accelerated in 1981 as he began distributing tables of nine countries' currency relationships, with which he could make rapid and trustworthy calculations. It shortly became apparent, however, that the Italian data were not sufficiently dependable for him to make reliable inferences about that country's currency values.
The basic calculating system was so adapted that could he but obtain regular and reliable data, he could fix the currency relationships among many more countries. Mee believed, however, that even his incomplete data had great utility. The currency relationships permitted him to determine the purchasing power of the Stelo and to express it in the national currency of a certain country. To be able to put the Stelo into service everywhere would require the joint work of a multinational network of collaborators. Yet Lawrence Mee continued.
Matters went still more rapidly after he purchased a computer, which by current norms would be considered primitive. It was already possible in September 1992 to rapidly calculate currency value predictions for different countries. Since then a booklet with the title Informkajero pri la Stelo (Notes about the Stelo) has been published and distributed through enthusiastic collaborators, especially by the Esperantocentrum in Aarhus, Denmark.
At the beginning of his study into the Stelo's purchasing power, Dr. Mee and his associates had already noted that the purchasing power in Great Britain had been determined arbitrarily: on 1 January 1977, for example, according to the large banks' currency agreements one pound was equal to 4.1875 guilder. Because one guilder was then defined as equal to 2 Steloj it followed that one pound would be equal to 8.375 Steloj. This exchange rate would remain until a more reliable method could be devised to directly compare the purchasing power in the two countries with each other. Dr. Mee also applied the same system to other countries.
Lawrence Mee had already reported an arbitrary decision on fixing the basic purchasing power of the Stelo in other countries outside the Netherlands. To fix its accounting basis he applied other arbitrary decisions, each time with the goal of presenting acceptable currency rates. Those decisions formed the system he employed to regularly calculate and publish currency conversion rates.
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