Why is an economic tornado always on the road straight ahead?

I also can’t help returning to a central subject of collective organization I’ve studied my whole professional career, the seeming fate of economies to bring periods of high cooperation to an end with total disaster.   The main cause could of course be said that no one in particular is at fault.   But there is science enough to identify who could intervene, and do something about it.

My previous post was on the work of  Ernst Ising, the physicist who solved a range of collective behavior problems, and how pattern language design science might address the question of what kinds of environments are required for emerging local phenomena.   Why economic collapse is always on the road straight ahead for our form of highly cooperative modern  economies is one such subject I’d like find physicists using Ising’s work on with.

One might wonder about what keeps driving our highly cooperative world economy toward escalating conflict.

All of humanity seems driven by a “rat race” toward extremes of destructive competition all the time, unable to escape, with most everyone feeling they are reacting in their own defense.   That’s not a model for a safe and secure world.

Could we possibly trace how the economic forces, like those driving everyone to achieve rapid growth in economic productivity, and so for the earth and humanity, creating circumstances ripe for triggering grand economic collapses.   If we can identify the system doing that we could identify interventions well in advance, to engage a “general protection fault” to avoid the usual mad collective collapse.

Why is an economic cyclone ALWAYS on the road straight ahead

 

I for one think it boils down to demanding people do impossible things, demanding of our society to do impossible things, like continually doubling the speed at which we collect and use energy and expand our control of the earth.   That can only end in tragedy, like it has for economies again and again. Why economies are driven to it, to be ever more productive at ever faster rates, follows unavoidably from their organization for maximizing compound returns from investment, making ever more from ever less.   Like being forced to “make bricks without straw”, the regular investment of profits in escalating to create ever more daunting competition ultimately compels cooperation in cheating.   In the end that unavoidably disrupts the order, as one of the natural outcomes of pointlessly taking the compounding of returns to its natural limit.

We could do something else if we understood the problem…

 

jlh

The duality required for collective organization.

An interesting global question is, to me, raised by Ernst Ising’s work in physics – (see the arxiv pre-print on his life and work if interested. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.01764.pdf)

Ising’s main work in the 1920’s was deriving a mathematical explanation for ferromagnetism, the ability of atoms in certain solid metals to develop aligned spins, and exhibit permanent magnetic fields in there surroundings as a result.   The part of that might be of interest from a pattern science viewpoint is how his model has been successfully applied to numerous collective phenomena, both other emergent collective atomic behaviors like magnetism as well as emergent collective macroscopic behaviors like the emergence of organization in crowds.

Ising’s general equation

The math, honestly, is beyond me, but there’s an interesting assumption in the work that might be discussed from a pattern science perspective, that the math rests on treating such phenomena as arising from purely local interactions.

Ising Said: “So, if we do not assume [ ] that [ ] quite distant elements exert an influence on each other [ ] we do not succeed in explaining ferromagnetism from our assumptions.  It is [thus] to be expected that this assertion also holds true for a spatial model in which only
elements in the nearby environment interact with each other.”

What I suspect is that there’s more of a wave/partical type duality present, involving both local and contextual interaction
in bringing about collective organization.

In the collective phenomena we observe there is certainly has a strong local character, whether it’s snowflake formation, ecologies, social movements or probably also the punctuated equilibria of emerging species.  All such collective phenomena seem to arise in relatively small centers and then spread mysteriously.  They also seem to require specially primed and fertile environments, as global conditions that are receptive to the local accumulation of collective designs.

So my question is who else is talking about this pattern of nature.    Is this raised in Christopher Alexander’s “The Nature of Order” or other pattern language writings?   Is it raised in the work of anyone else writing in the pattern language field?  More specifically, does it need to be understood to know how to describe the contexts we work in, perhaps such that a calm and receptive and so fertile context is needed to be a good host for pattern designs to flourish?

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jlh