Risk of a further physical system collapse

Conceptually it would be nice to have ever multiplying money, but the physical systems of the economy are not cooperating.

Hybrid models of how money systems are linked to the physical world, show why money is putting dangerously increasing performance demands on the underperforming physical assets. Those demands need to be understood and relieved, by some means other than a further substantial loss of the fabric of our society.

If you only want to think about it your own way, and not study my insights, that’s fine. Please speak with others you think need to understand the subject, though. I think we all feel the next wave of irreversible loss brewing. What also seems at risk is further loss of our physical ability to recover. Continue reading Risk of a further physical system collapse

A “Small but Beautiful” addition to the plan

Susan Witt, director of BurkShares community currency system presented on theFinance Lab Webinar today and I got to ask her to clarify how it eliminated the excess growth of debt. Then I thought of how the macro-economic solution Keynes first proposed could be usefully built into the design of local currencies to make them more popular and test the larger solution too.
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Susan,
Thanks for presenting on the Finance Lab today, and refreshing my understanding of how the BurkShares currency solves the debt growth problem. I actually attended a daylong seminar with Schumacher in the early 80’s but I seem to recall his director of the project, which I guess would have been you, was not there that day.

I remember trying to talk with him about one of the other strategies for keeping money and debt from growing unsustainably.  At that time I don’t think I even knew that Keynes and Boulding had seen the same option for allowing investment markets to stabilize at their natural healthy limits to growth. Continue reading A “Small but Beautiful” addition to the plan

But, can a whole economy be “Small is Beautiful”?

Most of the popular alternative economy proposals I read about, hold out hope we can return to simple living as the source of security it once was.  But how would we actually reduce the complexity of society and return to self-reliance, while somehow keeping our modern culture and character?

Can we really go ahead to the past?  Everyone seems to want to.

I really don’t think that’s remotely possible. There’s no sliding scale of time. The future can only be built from the the present.

I also hear a lot of criticism of the “sweeping technology solutions”, and would tend to agree with criticisms of things like high speed rail.  They’re proposed as if meant to have the economic impact that new highway systems did before.  It’s inappropriate to think change can now proceed by ever bigger steps as before.

There’s also a tendency to promote things like home energy conservation as an economic stimulus, but that is not in the least bit like discovering a new cheap source of energy, for example.  Trying to imagine how societies can change dramatically seems to bring out a lot of incomplete thinking.

It’s as if the question conceals a real lack of imagination these days. I think there’s a lot of evidence we’re grasping at straws. Continue reading But, can a whole economy be “Small is Beautiful”?

Billions of cells looking for what to make whole

How a body comes to become self-organized…

begins with the perfection of a single cell and then a furious multiplication of their numbers and connections of increasingly complex design. Outside observers may know what the overall plan is from similar events before, but no cell does. As independent organisms themselves the cells just work it all out by local give and take.

begins with the perfection of a single cell and then a furious multiplication of their numbers

People organize ideas by determining rules of logic about categories, though, so our models have no independently behaving parts. That we just don’t think the way nature works makes how nature actually does work much more difficult to appreciate.

Still, you can see nature working that magic that allows distributed systems of systematically multiplying parts to become whole again, making things we like and depend on all around us. Continue reading Billions of cells looking for what to make whole

Scientists admit to physical world!

A bit tongue in cheek about a serious subject.   It’s following from my comment to Dot Earth about how all the climate mitigation plans do actually allow for a mysteriously silly expectation that reducing CO2 could be funded by an economy causing all other economic impacts to endlessly multiply.

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Dateline: No York Times 5/12/10

Scientists admit to physical world

Scientists have finally admitted there might be a physical world, in addition to the existence of scientific theory, long used to explain the source of all information.

Despite there being no information to explain it, as theory is ample by itself, scientists admitted today that there was also no information to deny the popular notion that there might be a physical world.   It “could be creating natural phenomena and not just our theory” Dr Hyper Foible said. Continue reading Scientists admit to physical world!

What’s there to look for? – useful principles of change

Discussion of systems thinking principles. See Bump on a curve notepad” for others


what if you were in the first generation of humans to realize that we now need to steer

Make believe that you are in a vehicle, born there, and didn’t realize it needed to be steered or even could be.   Somehow you realize if it guided itself before, you not need to start steering it around various hazards ahead, and find yourself part of the first generation of humans to realize that.

With there being no established method for doing it, no one else can tell you how. What would you do?

The first thing is to familiarize yourself with all the parts you had just taken for granted before, like all the amazingly common complex things that take care of themselves and never needed tending before. We need to look at them with fresh eyes, as if we were new born and dropped unexpectedly into a new environment. Continue reading What’s there to look for? – useful principles of change

How to build a “multiverse”, the general case

Responding to a somewhat ‘edgy’ physics blog post, How to build a Multiverse, about the “creation of adjacent spaces with their own laws of physics”. here’s my “general case” posted as #comment-219799

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It’s actually a lot less ‘hokey’ than it sounds, that one might discover small worlds with their own original “laws of nature”.  It not hokey because it’s also not in the least bit uncommon. It might even be said to be the most commonly unrecognized thing in the world.

“universal laws” may often be “local laws”, of the system from which an observer is part of

Unique explanatory models would ALWAYS be are needed where natural systems emerge with their own original interior sets of relationships.  That’s the real problem of emergence, and local originality which we observe in all sorts of both expected and unexpected places.   What such “local laws of nature” might include or discard relative to what conventional theory says is instructive, and a bit disturbing.

It appears much of what people have come to think of as “universal laws” are not at all, but actually “local laws” of the system which an observer is part of.   So it seems it’s our own self-serving questions that lead us to seeing them as universal. Continue reading How to build a “multiverse”, the general case