Reading Nature’s Signals

3/15/10 This is an edited foreword for my 3/13 post and a P.S.

A recent note came from Charles Hall, with two interesting things. He passed along the Peak Oil Review pointing out again how oil prices are edging upward even as the economy slips. That’s one of the features of our trying to grow with diminishing resources as I offered a theoretical basis for in “Profiting from scarcity” last year.

Then he mentioned a provocative series of graphs from Nathan’s Economic Edge. These are graphs of first derivative rates, with the one below showing rates of increase of US national income fluctuating wildly as “steady growth” has been frequently broken by recessions. It also gives an impression like the increasing roller coaster experience of keeping up with economic change.

The real question is why would the irregular rate of economic growth remind us of the increasingly desperate struggle it has been, and what does that tell us. I think there is a basis for saying that it’s because we are in fact struggling with an increasingly impossible task, with recessions being the times when we discover what increasingly radical changes we all have to learn to keep up with.

It’s a complex question, though, and in the first draft of this post I mistakenly encouraged the visual appearance of ups and downs in the rate of economic expansion to be interpreted as financial instability. It only shows increasing instability if you associate it with the successively steeper and riskier learning challenges it represents too. Growth does in fact push people to do more with less by ever bigger steps relative to our own learning capacities.

As all the kinds of environmental complication and resistance to growth increase, that struggle is ever less of a success too. As toward the end of a Ponzi scheme or financial bubble when people start to get sloppy and take risks that later seem inconceivable, being caught up in juggling increasingly impossible tasks strongly affects your judgment too. That is the more complex side of the story.

For now I’m leaving the post as it was, though, hoping you can read it in that light and just adding a P.S. at the bottom. The connection between financial stability and our increasing struggle to keep up with accelerating change is what needs to be discussed, and I hardly touch on it here. The ‘P.S.’ shows the pattern of growth volatility all way from 1890 to the present. It’s been much the same all along, and I’m sorry I forgot to check that before taking the suggestion from the recent trends that the pattern was changing dramatically. It’s not. The long trend is of an increasing rate of economic expansion with frequently large interruptions exposing some of the tumult it involves. The whole progression of increasingly challenging learning tasks is what’s increasingly unstable I think, but the graphs themselves don’t show that.

Seeing recessions as marking time in our taking on physically bigger, more challenging and ultimately unachievable efforts to reorganize and control the earth is what I’ve been trying to explain since I understood it, in the 1970’s. Growth may seem to have been stable, using it’s products to multiply the process, but it’s hard to ignore the constant interruption by painful recessions, or the completely unmanageable nature of the actual goal of accelerating forever.

Where the “rubber hits the road” for that question is when the growth process runs into natural diminishing returns on its increasing investment of our efforts. By all counts that was in the 1950’s when the economies stopped finding ever more bountiful and cheaper resources and began finding increasing costs and complications as their return on increasing investment instead. My first graph of that, from 1979, is below.

****************************************
The problem was correctable 30 years ago when I first noticed how it worked and it remains correctable today, if and only if (however) people see it as a physical process having a physical cause. It is a physical process our cultural conversation does not yet have much awareness of, however, so our increasing struggles to fix things remain less likely to make things better than worse.

This first graph shows U.S. National income. The normal physical process that would cause this kind of increasing instability is that economic growth is produced by our continually changing economic strategies by successively bigger and faster steps. That leads to the process becoming an series of ever more perilous crises for coordinating the parts of the economy as they each try to keep up. It’s the lag times in discovery and response to ever more complicated and difficult changes in methodology that do it. They naturally become ever more uncoordinated,

I think that’s what’s happening and that what’s physically driving it is our habitual use of investments of all kinds, financial, human intellect, material resources, etc, to multiply our investments in speeding up our changing strategies, by “constant” %’s. We make the mistake of thinking constant %’s change maintains stability when it multiplies imbalances we have to run ever harder to catch up with.

Regular % increase is how nearly everyone defines our self-interest. It seems to be in many ways, except it also destabilizes the physical process of adaptive change on which it depends… If we had just stuck with one thing for a while, it would have lasted for a long while. This fault in how we keep accelerating our way of changing was correctable before and is still correctable now, if people come to understand what the real cause is.

This 2nd graph illustrates my early thinking on the escalating crisis scenario for “growth induced collapse”. It’s an image of multiple technology sectors needing to cooperate and each making successive technology and resource discovery breakthroughs. After the point of diminishing returns regularly bigger ones are still needed but smaller ones are found. So the frequency and complexity of changes in methods increases instead, and toward a point of failure. It’s a completely natural interplay between delayed response and compounding growth stimulus.

The graph is from my first paper on the subject “The Infinite Society” as part of a self-published book of essays in 1979 including “An unhidden pattern of events” discussing my early studies of a science of uncontrolled natural systems. It’s about how uncontrolled natural systems that become unstable are a major part of the eventfulness of the world, and why some are quite predictable. I’ve done much more since, except for figuring out how to get people to go far enough in differentiating between our cultural realities and reasoning that animate our minds and the physical systems that animate nature …

Maybe that elusive key for most people discovering what is apparently “hidden in sight” would be to call these things “unnatural systems”. They come from somewhere other than where people “naturally look”, i.e. not found in the values and explanations in our minds we most commonly think of to represent nature and the economies. Where the animating processes of the world are actually located, in that sense, is in “unnatural” systems that have no values or purposes but still somehow work by their own internal designs… That the real systems of nature are in that sense “brains with no thoughts” is not what people have shown much interest in yet.

If people just go as far as they can trying to understand it, and then asked for help, some of my methods would show how to continue on further from wherever they got. If we don’t ever notice how these “unnatural systems” control most of our choices, well then our own ideas of self-interest won’t connect with them.

Why we have had an increasingly unstable world has never been that we were not trying to do what was right, is my way of explaining the contradiction between good will and bad outcomes the world over. Our multiplying crises seem to be largely inadvertent consequences of pushing our systems beyond their natural limits of stability, unaware. The root error seems to be not realizing that the animated parts of the world are not located in our thinking. They seem to have lives of their own in that sense.

pfh

**************************************** P.S. 3/15/10
For another view here is the graph of yearly changes in US GDP back to 1890. From this view the first question is why the rate of increase in GDP has never been in the least bit stable, always lurching from recession to recession. It’s rare to not have a decade without a year of economic decline.

The basic subject I raised was whether growing economies force us to change strategies more frequently as we run into natural limits. If you think of recessions as “the new upsetting the old”, then it seems growing economies force people to learn how to cope with that quite frequently, to make leaps of change in their lives and the world. The leaps get bigger is what I’m interpreting as a decidedly unstable progression.

It takes realizing that the tasks of relearning get bigger for people in absolute terms because our minds are the same and the actual changes are materially bigger and far more complex at each stage. So the systemic volatility that looks sort of “constant” in proportion to GDP causes people to make ever bigger, faster and more complex changes in their own solutions.

Models overlook that. Models are just curves on paper and don’t show people are taking on increasingly complex and risky learning tasks. They also doesn’t show when people are increasingly misunderstanding the problems ahead. It’s apparent in this long term trend curve, though, that the present frequency and severity of the business cycle as about “normal”.

As you get closer to natural limits, finding ways to grow by accelerating the use of resources in short supply would be less an less sustainable as an economic strategy. Mature economic systems that needed resources that no longer exist would fail without being replaced. These days we do also seem to see whole industries come and go with the fog… as it were. The music industry an now even journalism are sort of “gone with the wind”.

The biggest factor destabilizing growth now may be the permanent switch to scarcity pricing for all our limited resources, as resource supply is then no longer responsive to price and demand. That’s not in our economic models is part of the big problem… As I discussed in “Profiting from scarcity“, I think that switch may have already happened, as seen in the worldwide commodities price explosion this past decade leading up to the 2008 financial collapse. For six years there was a ~25%/yr price increase due to globally unresponsive supply for food and fuel resources as peak oil supply occurred at the same time as peak oil demand. It’s not in the models, but I think it happened anyway.

pfh

Sometimes it pays to recognize circular arguments with no escape, and realize one or more of the core assumptions causing that needs to be questioned. The presently brutal and worsening job market in the developed countries is often discussed with a circular argument: that stimulus isn’t working so we need more, but governments run a risk of collapse if the jobs are not productive… That is now heard over and over, and it’s worth looking at it as painting a circle of common assumptions that everyone would like to escape.

The problem caused by economies becoming unresponsive to Keynesian stimulus was actually brilliantly studied by Keynes… His simple conclusion was that when stimulus provided by governments filling in as “spenders of last resort” didn’t work then investors would need to take that role, even to the point of ending the accumulation of investment to make economies physically sustainable. The assumption that is not variable is that we live in a finite world.

The circular dilemma of *instability in every direction* that everyone now sees facing the world economy, comes from unemployment and the economies not being responsive to stimulus… That is what JM Keynes addressed in his “widow’s cruse” proposal, when conditions “became so miserable” that net returns on investment approach zero, due to systemic over investment. What he proposed, and was roundly criticized for and eventually simply dismissed as “the fallacy”, … switching the “spender of last resort” from government to investors.

From a political view it does sound crazy, but from a systems science view it’s quite clearly the only choice. Kenneth Boulding pointed to the natural necessity of it when facing either temporary or permanent limits to growth too. I’ve also written on it a good bit as systems physics. It closely matches one of the tricky changes of plan that apparently all natural systems that become sustainable figure out how to do on their own. They switch to using the surplus they devoted to auto-catalytic growth to something else that’s productive when that self-inflation process becomes unproductive. (see development path model below)

It may “sound crazy” but it is actually a quite surprisingly practical solution. That is to persuade the Saudi’s, Chinese, our own super rich and other investors to *spend the economy back to health*, giving back to the economic system that made them rich instead of continuing to sit around and expect the world to make them ever richer when it is in fact actually failing badly.

It takes the kind of brilliance displayed by Barack Obama in observing that if the Republicans in the US Congress had decided to take over the government’s ability to function, then they had implicitly assumed a responsibility to govern too. That brilliance didn’t make them do it, of course, but at least it pointed to the problem. Today, investors have largely taken over control of the world’s financial institutions and governments, in fact, and need to take responsibility for assuming that role.

www.synapse9.com

from my Finance Lab blog post

Twenty-five years ago I discovered that Keynes had come to the same conclusion as I had about how to achieve a stable steady state economy, and that Ken Boulding had been talking about it for decades too. His idea came from also realizing that capitalism would produce an over-investment crisis when the environment started producing diminishing returns and those with wealth would keep multiplying their investments. He called is utterly radical proposal, because it was pure systems ecology, “the widow’s cup”. It was called “the fallacy” by everyone around him, though, and so it broadly remains today.

It’s a neat bit of history, and points to a side of the issue with many practical and moral quandaries that must, of physical necessity, be solved. It’s only clear to me that Keynes saw the obvious logical conclusion and everyone around him was outraged and offended by it… I guess he saw right away it “wouldn’t fly”. He thought it would be the “more favorable possibility” when the earth produced declining rates of return for people with surplus savings to divest them at least as fast as they accumulated. That’s what would prevent average returns from falling to or below zero.

The issue is that when an economy is stable it produces a stable positive rate of returns on investment. Because people tend to put their savings into those guaranteed bets and continually add their winnings to their bets, the growth of investment naturally keeps growing when the earths capacity to produce uniform positive returns does not. There are actually a wide variety ways to solve the problem, but you have to start by addressing it first. Discussion of it doesn’t seem to start till it becomes obvious that continuing increases in investment inevitably drive average returns below zero and would undermine everyone’s investments of every kind.

That’s a “physical world” perspective, not a cultural or theoretical world perspective. People need to get creative to discover their own theoretical or cultural responses. It wasn’t to be “reasonable” that nature made growth systems so they would upset the conditions of their own growth. Nature only needs things to work physically. That growth systems can upset themselves is one of her collection of ways to cause complex systems to change form. She’s quite happy to have systems that require their parts to respond ever faster to ever bigger changes and spin out of control to produce a lot of new compost…

So, I think it is the attempt to assure guaranteed compound returns that is creating impossible tasks and choices for people to respond to all over, and dramatically propelling the whole world toward chaos. It’s a fascinating reality that I’ve been studying for some time. It includes surprising twists and turns, like exposing how much garden variety folk wisdom really applies globally. The solution is really quite similar to how any normal small store owner manages their business, when they have used their profits to maximize their market return, they turn the use of the profits to something else.

I have a longer summary as a draft article Economies that become part of nature and an earlier proposal for Natural system economies with more on Keynes’ Widow’s Cruse and other things.

Reposted from my Finance Lab blog

The way social customs develop, and community standards, what to expect is formed by agreement and not by research all the time. Then people teach what others before them agreed on. I think that could be the main reason why for a few hundred years everyone assumed the right thing for economies would be regular % change just because everyone wanted steady improvement. It seems the effect of multiplying economies on the earth was never really studied, but just whether it to fix the problems that arose or not.

As a physicist in the mid 70’s I was watching the curiously creative behavior of a lot of uncontrolled natural “economic systems”, heat transport by convective currents inside buildings. I spent a couple years doing of 24hr micro-climate fingerprints of buildings, closely studying how their air current networks competed for flow channels and evolved new organization several times a day as the sun moved around. Every individual air current begins with a little feedback loop. That animates the development of its heat transport system, and without that systemization process there would only be conduction, not convection. Individual air currents are somewhat like individual businesses in the larger economy of the current networks, with swarm behavior that shifts from hour to hour as the heat from the sun comes from different directions.

I was part of what was called the “appropriate technology” movement at the time, and writing for RAIN magazine among other things. There was a lot of general discussion in that community of the environment and the earth, of limits to growth and the economy, etc. So I used what I had learned about from how uncontrolled organization developed in air current networks to ask what would happen to constant growth systems in general, just looking for general principles.

Organizational change of continually doubling scale may be logically consistent, but becomes naturally confusing to any physical system itself, is what I found. That’s because physical systems have multiple scales of organization that conceptual systems don’t. Regular change by %’s for physical systems is not just a change in size, but also of complexity and speed of reorganization with increasing higher derivative rates of accelerating acceleration. You see organizational limits and disruptive system change in air currents with the onset of turbulence sometimes. With turbulence systematically smooth flows that become too intense may suddenly explode in small scale eddies and collapse the heat transport process. You often see that at the top of a column of smoke from a candle, for example.

I also found that I was asking questions about uncontrolled systems in a new way, considering them as locally evolving individuals, rather than as instances of fixed statistical equations. Because it very much involved my understanding of the physics of energy flow, and mainstream physics never studied autonomous systems that way, I had no one to talk to about it.

So, that’s the second reason it seems the question was never asked for the economies. Science had only been studying controlled systems, or if studying uncontrolled systems, only looking for the aspects you could represent with formulas as if they were controlled. I was watching individual cells of organization develop for which there was clearly too much happening too fast to record.

A third reason the question wasn’t raised suggests a deeper problem for practical science, how our ideas of change for the earth are more similar to how conceptual models work than to how physical systems work. Conceptual systems are not organized at all like physical systems. Logic can easily project large changes with small effort and involve no developmental processes connecting cause and effect, for example. Large and small change in mental models takes about the same amount of energy (i.e. “not much”). In physical systems changes take a continuity of developmental processes using generally proportional amounts of energy and the discovery of proportional complications.

What seems to show that our idea of economic growth is based on thinking of the economy as a mental rather than physical system is that growth is thought of as a constant rate of change. Physically it’s a multiplying complexity of change. Al Bartlet has been sketching “big wow” examples of the meaning of growth for many years, that I have learned from and enjoyed his entertaining style. Recently it occurred to me to look at the IPCC and OECD projections that way, for the long term environmental impacts of energy use on climate. The figure below shows their 1300 year projection of ocean levels. I inserted the curve at the left that rapidly goes off the page, corresponding to the level of GDP implied in their model, and some notes.

Economic impacts are shown to be ever decreasing, though ocean levels continue to slowly rise. At the end of the period, and still multiplying, the steady growth projection for the economy would have resulted in an average productivity for every square foot on earth about equal to 700 present day global economies. That’s relatively easy to imagine in our minds, is the point, but it has no physical reality or meaning at all. So… one thing leads to another. Neglecting the difference between physical systems and metal shortcuts is hazardous, and can only be extended so far before you need to look and see what else might be happening.

To ask the right question is how we can reduce our negative impacts on the world. Choosing the right things to spend on doesn’t really do that, for two very good reasons. Most money you spend will have average impacts per dollar anyway, producing 3/4 lb of CO2 and contributing to an increase of 3% in what we try to control in nature, per dollar. So buying expensive “green” products does more harm than cheap products by having nearly the same average impact per dollar. You could buy cheaper products, but because you’d then buy more there’s no escape… either way.

The key is changing the question. It’s not what you buy, but what you use it for. Whatever you spend on, judge it by how well you or others can use it to change the future. It’s not what need you serve today but the lasting meaning of what you do with your choices. A switch to sustainability is one from satisfying wants to having a lasting meaning for the world around you.

We need to, as a whole community, get off the path we are on but seem captives in a spiral of seeing how far we can push our presently narrowing path before it closes out entirely. It’s like the housing bubble, but it’s a bubble of thinking we can and need to take ever increasing control of our environments. That we can control things better in the short term is the illusion that keeps us thinking we can control ever more things in a misbehaving world without losing control in the long term.

That is a complete illusion, of course, just the same way the limitless appreciation of housing values was an illusion, a bubble of misinformation created by a circle of little self-deceptions… that we all thought was fun but turned out badly. What we need to figure out is how to allow things that are naturally uncontrolled to take care of themselves, a different path to making peace with nature. from “What to do” 3/6/10

The real trouble with understanding your own accumulative effects on the world is that the human theory of cause and effect, like pool balls bouncing around transmitting effects from elsewhere, isn’t the way nature accumulates effects. Bouncing balls is not the glue nature uses, you might say. The effects of pressures and forces are real and all, but they nearly all dissipate as they bounce around, rather than accumulate. So…our usual idea of “cause and effect” simply does not apply. That’s a key reason for why good intentions often don’t have their intended effect…

Lasting cause and effect in nature is about how things that are organized from the inside develop on their own, make use of their environments as they develop. They may capitalize on the crumbs of opportunity you leave lying around, perhaps, as if the systems of nature, cultures and ecologies, were organisms engaged in foraging and dodging as their way of learning and growing.

Most things in nature which are organized and animated from the inside seem to respond to finding limits in one direction by poking around in other directions near bye. Complex human societies, one after another in history, seem to have collapsed because human cultures get stuck on directions of exploration that run out.

To me it looks like they just find themselves unable to look around and change with the times. It appears to be caused physiologically by our way of defining our realities as independent social agreements on what to believe, and treating those cultural realities as if they were the world we live in.

Today it seems new cultural realities are multiplying furiously, as if we were responding to a need to replace ones that had run out. They don’t seem to be leading the main culture anywhere, though, but developing more and more separate little cells, and just breaking the main culture apart. That we have a common physical world that physically determines our choices makes that one quite reliable universal connection we could develop. - from What To Do

I think the answer is, well, yes of course… Most people seem to
intuitively confuse increasing their access to resources with increasing the
supply when increasing their access to resources actually decreases the earth’s
supply.

This is another way to understand the various mysterious efforts
to reduce the impacts of growth by streamlining and accelerating growth, which
of course multiplies its impacts. It basically means we are not being
self-critical and asking the hard questions. The easiest data to display the
effect with is the world energy/GDP balance:

Improving technology makes it appear that our resource supplies are increasing when it’s really the depletion of resources of ever higher cost that is increasing.

Nearly everyone assumes that improving efficiency would reduce energy use but it has actually been increasing energy use by a ratio of 1unit of efficiencies to 2.5 units of new uses created. It seems to have had had that reverse effect for as long as anyone has kept records (see notes
Inside Efficiency. Improving efficiency does increase OUR PERSONAL resources, and so reduces OUR PERSONAL resource constraints accordingly. It just doesn’t increase the earth’s resources or its resource constraints.

This translates into a serious unavoidable natural liabilities bubble for
economies designed to serve personal needs rather than become sustainable. As solving resource needs that way begins to create a problem of needing to do it ever faster, you run into natural obligations to escalate investment for
declining returns. It applies to any system that sustains its growth by
accelerating resource depletion, as all our traditional development schemes seem to do.

So, increasing the resources at our command (our demand) seems to be thought of as our supply… but accelerates depletion
of the real supply

The same general principle of systems ecology applies to the development of any other kind of resource available to be exploited. Though it starts out
continually increasing our supply of things, improving technology to create more
supply accelerates depletion (the earth’s supply), leading to a liabilities bubble.

All directions of development are subject to the same natural terminal limits of increasing investment leading to diminishing returns on investment. It occurs as a system runs into increasing difficulty on approaching natural limits to its
resources and ability to reorganize itself.

The way the principle is used in systems ecology, since simple conceptual models don’t adequately describe any natural system, is to rephrase the principle as a question. You then search the environment for indications of when the implied points of diminishing and then vanishing returns are approaching. You start by asking for any development system what complications might arise as it tries to control ever more of its environment.

I think people are definitely confusing their supplies and the earth’s supply,
quite generally. The trouble seems to be that it is done so very habitually that
even professionals can’t really discus the matter, so much of our common
language and popular ideas are mixed up that way.

From Jim Maendel on a Linkedin Foresight group

Phil,
[I was] just looking for smart people to join our group. After checking out your site, I believe you may be overqualified. Your stuff is brilliant. I found this portion on the market pundits fascinating:

“Well, I’ve been wondering for a long time why the flows of change are so hard for people to see, and do think there’s some kind of “fixed world illusion” to contend with. There’s a list of reasons why we don’t update our information regularly and so miss the flows of change because of that. It’s a little speculative, but another detail caught my attention recently, that even when repeated changes in “normal” are quite dramatic, people often only have to “sleep on it” to readjust and see even very short lived situations as if they were permanent and a brand new permanent “normal”.

Nearly every pundit and media source from 2007 to the present has radically changed their stories about the economic collapse nearly every week… for example, always seeming very comfortable with the “ever present” finality of their quickly changing stories. It’s like there’s a “reset button” that they all keep using, that hides the facts of accelerating change.

I’ve been wondering about what that has to do with sleep. Could it be that the way the mind digests information collected during a waking day is similar to how your computer loads new software updates when you shut it down to reboot? Could both need to operate with a fixed system that is regularly updated when turned off? Sleep might clear the memory and refresh the world image. Perhaps relieving the conscious mind of continual complex rethinking accounts for our not noticing how our own world is changing.

That would be a very efficient design concept, having brain’s that refresh their model of life every night and give you an fresh but changeless new “snapshot” copy every day, an ever changing “blank page”. If you live in a stable world it’s only a minor defect that the strategy would arrange our awareness as always of a fixed world, moving you through life one fixed frame at a time, that you would not need to consciously account for. That sort of defines the “fixed world illusion”, as well as the common experience of life in a changing world as an “ever present”….

from The Bump on a Curve Notepad

I’ll have to chew on this site for a while. Jim
—-

Jim,

Thanks so much! Once you start uncovering these things, how perception is just not working as intended… they sometimes come out in bunches. Another one that connects a lot of what ruins so many of our solutions is the unintended way nature is producing multiplying problems. It’s in direct response to our overextending our attempts to multiplying solutions.

Maybe the main one is “doing well by doing good”, putting money into problem solving to take more money out… The problem with that is in a constrained environment (like we’re in) that multiplies our problems faster than the solutions. It also takes money away from the interests supposedly invested in.

The way investing in healthcare is making us need more healthcare as well as making healthcare completely unaffordable is an example(1). How making the economy more resource efficient is multiplying the rate at which it uses resources is another.(2)

Pushing against constraints in a non-expanding environment, investing in competitive learning to “raise all boats” will often have the opposite effect. It may just give the fast learners and easily solved problems more resources… and take resources away from other people and their oability to take care of themselves. How our solutions become self-defeating seems mainly that as the world changed we weren’t paying attention.

So, how we’re all caught up in self-defeating solutions is definitely something to look at!

1) http://www.sustainabilitank.info/2010/03/01/the-troubling-truth-the-trouble-with-good-when-being-good-at-controlling-nature-we-create-addiction-take-for-instance-the-healthcare-case/
2) http://www.synapse9.com/pub/EffMultiplies.htm

Jan 25,2010 comment Re: Alternative Energy Newswire’s We need not make any important sacrifices for natural life style

I wish I could get the next level of thinking to spread as easily as the old thinking keeps spreading… The waves we’re making in nature are indeed simply too big, but we regularly take the wrong message from that.

It’s so important to not take that as meaning that there is something wrong with making waves in nature. What we need is to discover why the waves we make have kept getting so much bigger.

My little essay “Throwing our energy at impossible dreams” (also linked there) is about these kinds of logical tricks nature plays on us, particularly when so many of our environmental relationships are changing all at once. There’s a problem with trying to reduce impacts by buying better products. That’s part of the formula for economic growth. It’s actually been by learning to produce things more efficiently that we kept adding %’s to the scale of our uses of the earth, and outgrew its limits in the first place.

There are two kinds of addition, addition by totals and addition by %’s. For some mysterious reason, pure social convention of it seems, people don’t distinguish between them. The physical difference is that the first kind of addition is self-limiting and the other kind of addition measures ever multiplying imbalance. Somehow in the past two hundred years we came to define social stability as addition by %’s, or ever multiplying imbalance in relation to the earth.

It means we organized all our institutions around making waves “just a bit bigger” all the time. That actually creates waves of ever multiplying scale. That we add by %’s instead of by totals is why our equations never add up, or add up only to ever more dramatic mistakes now. Green products or blue, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter in the least if we skip over the need to learn how to add up the totals.

Could we change the questions we’ve been asking.. and learn how to add maybe? I don’t know. It’s an enormous blind spot it seems.

letter to NPR -

You say “all things considered”.

How about looking around to see what you’ve been missing? If familiar ideas seem exhausted, what chance is there someone with surprising new observations on our various “wicked problems” would have something worth looking into?

What if such a person were a physical systems scientist, who’s been right about how the present financial crisis would develop for 30 years, and has not really needed to change their story over and over like virtually everyone else, but to only confirm it over and over? What if they still maintain the problem is an accumulation of misinformation in the economy, and that makes it basically correctable?

If there’s something about money, our *measure* of wealth, causing it to multiply when the *reality* of wealth doesn’t, nothing will work right till that’s fixed.

The economy is a physical process, running into continually increasing difficulty with the physical world, and still projecting growth with ever less difficulty… Why don’t you ever hear about that on ATC??

Try me. I can help.