Some small progress.... on
a big change in plans - p.henshaw 1/13/09
I’ve been making some progress with understanding why and
how the rules on earth seem changed. Nature changed them in what amounts to a
most insidious way. She changed the meaning of investment from multiplying
opportunity to multiplying complications. Since our whole culture and all our
experts are still using the old meaning of the rule while working on a planet
where it switched, it means there is a great error in the present recovery plan
for the economies, as well as one in the plans to avoid the effects of climate
change. We missed a very major turn in history. It
involves understanding some natural systems physics, but I’m getting a little
better at making that understandable too.
It might take a little open discussion, of course, just to
clearly understand what I’m referring to, but it's as if nature turned the
meaning of growth and investment upside down, in the most natural way.
Our
old sustainability plan, growth, now has the opposite effect on the earth it did
before. It used to multiply opportunity and making everything cheaper, but
now at the limits it shrinks opportunity and makes everything more expensive. Every kind of system begins with an environment of
multiplying returns on investment. In an environment of diminishing returns,
though, investment no
longer multiplies opportunities and opens ever greater horizons. Once the
point of approaching limits is crossed, further increasing investment shrinks and
complicates the options, resulting in narrower and more conflicted choices.
We’re still operating as if we had an untouched earth with limitless
resources. That’s was certainly a good approximation for the experience we had
as our culture developed over the last few hundred years, but it is no longer
true at all. The rules are changed, but our culture didn’t know to expect it,
and hasn’t noticed yet. Our whole way of thinking only fits the
past.
Where this all goes back to seems to be the “missing anatomy
of entropy” you might call it. Science has focused exclusively on the aspects
of nature that one can explain with certainty, using fixed formulas and
replacing
controlled variables for physical things. The tendency for things to
decay and for energy to get lost, “entropy” was left undescribed and
relegated to “general stuff that’s
inexplicable”, a kind of error factor in the equations. That’s a great
large
hiding place in a model for things of nature that don’t fit your model. When
you look carefully it seems to contain all kinds of natural phenomena that the
use of formulas to explain things doesn’t work for.
For one it seems to be nature’s natural hiding place for the “wastes” of a
process that as 'feedback' serve to build and maintain systems, nature’s
own investment strategy. Much of the 'loss factor' for the processes
of nature is what gets lost in building things, ALONG WITH the mechanisms that
tear them down. I have a collection of my research letters on various
subjects on my website blog, including a good recent simple one on this
particular subject: http://synapse9.com/signals/2009/01/13/the-anatomy-of-entropy/
In natural systems one of the most important functions of
diverting products from the process, as "wastes" in that sense, is to use them
to
build the system itself. The food you ate as a child was partly used
to make bones, for example, as well as to let you
run around. The bones were a "loss of resources", relative to the running
around, the apparent purpose of life for you at the time. In nature
building the system is the first sustainable product of the system, and then
when it matures, the second sustainable product for it to
find it’s place in its environment. It's odd, but this principle is
not recognized in science. What seems to get missed is that this ‘waste’ of the system's
products that gets
invested back into building and integrating the system with its world is
exceptionally hard to trace, and does not fit a set formula.
As a result it gets lumped into the "entropy" or "disorder factor" for nature,
just treated as lost, and so has not been studied. I
even kept trying to have the growth in natural systems included on the list of unsolved
problems of physics on Wikipedia, and it kept getting erased. Having
not studied it we haven’t know to look for when to ask if the remarkable syntropy with the
earth our civilization has enjoyed in the past (the positive feedback from our
investments) would change to become increasingly expensive.
In
physics as well as in economics the assumption is that the past is the future,
particularly for any kind of "law of nature" you don’t understand. When
you only
know how to refer to things with vague generalities, cultural preferences then
also seem to have a lot of influence. That for a few centuries nature seemed to extend a limitless multiplying hand
to our desires for ever multiplying wealth, has clearly been part of the
persuasion. It let us arrange all our theories, practices and
promises to line up with a perfectly impossible dream, that an endless multiplying
syntropy for all our wishes would surely be a permanent feature of the universe,
just as soon as we got it right! Walt Disney made a
great animated movie about the ancient Greek tale of the Sorcerer's Apprentice,
which fits our circumstance quite well. Disney video on
YouTube:
The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Anyway, what is quite predictable is that nothing ever
begins without experiencing something like temporarily unlimited syntropy, the
building process during which a ‘waste’ of some of the product multiplies the
process. That develops in the naturally explosive way that feedbacks do,
first getting more and more productive and then less and less productive, as the
opportunity for it in the environment is explored and consumed. The key to
making that a useful observation is that you don’t need to trace every part of a
whole complex system to read the experience of the system as a whole. You can
“look around” at the returns on investment, whether they are multiplying
opportunity or multiplying complications, whether they are limited mostly by the amount of
investment or becoming limited by their environment.
That
switch would be naturally expected at some point for any development process,
but I think it occurred for the world economy about 50-100 years ago. The
economic measurements are obscured by the turbulent politics of the 20th
century, and the diversion of investment into fictitious bubbles more recently,
or I think you could clearly see the declining productivity of investment in the changing
shape of
the growth curve. The point at which the syntropy of economic investment switched
meanings though, seems surely to at least have been by the time it was noticed
that development had major attendant complications, the time when a global
environmental movement emerged as a major social and political force of concern
about our colliding with limits. That’s an easy way to mark the shift in
attention from concern only with building up ourselves in a limitless place to
the issues we were running into in a
crowded place. That switch in attention, from free multiplication to
integrating with the complications of a rich environment is the “point of
diminishing returns” for multiplying investment. That “turning point” in the
curve was the limit of growth, the point where the natural rules changed, being crossed at the very moment in time when the
subject came up. From then on the ‘benefits’ of sticking with the growth path
switched from being endless multiplying wealth to endless multiplying
complications.
So,...
now that we overshot the curve and collapsed, and don't have a lot of untapped
resources to use, what should we do?? The Obama
plan for economic recovery simply won’t work is because this is not 1930
again. It’s a plan to undo the collapse and resume perpetual
growth
on the original path. It maintains the perennial assumption of the economists
that we have a limitless earth of ever expanding opportunity, and that old rules
never change. What we have been clearly observing is the opposite, though. We
have already built the airports, and already burned the earth’s entire store of
cheap jet fuel, the kind of great expansions that were key to making the recovery of the 30’s a success.
We also already destroyed and rebuilt Europe and Japan to future
stimulate our new high energy consuming technology. Similar
projects and resources are not in the offing, just the need to replace the
workings of in-place systems with more expensive technology than was used
before. All our options appear ever more expensive, not ever cheaper. Virtually every important resource is showing
diminishing returns for our increasing investments. We’re
scraping the bottom. for example, of our good available arable land and water
resources, and the "green revolution" seems unlikely to be repeated. When you look at the plans for mitigating the effects of global
warming you find they all are predicated on multiplying the expansion of the
economies to solve the problems that the multiplying expansion of the economies
caused. They're also predicated on paying for it with the future
multiplying profits that continued exploding growth should produce, all the
while the evidence is that our conflicting interests and reliance on efficiency as a
resource make growth ever more complex and less profitable. Perhaps this
long recession we now see opening up in front of us, a bad hangover caused by
the financial collapse, is really the gift in disguise we truly needed to help
us sober us up.
We’ve been burning up the future potential of the earth at an amazing
accelerating rate, and it seems this may give us a well deserved chance to think.
I'm all for government making investments to stabilizing
things of real lasting value that the economic collapse threatens,
communities and workforces and things. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume
that we’ll have ever multiplying profits from exploiting the earth, as the
future of a hundred years ago did to pay for recovering from the last collapse, though. We need to account for how the whole earth is
producing increasing complications and diminishing returns, for nearly
everything we are doing. The curves we are on clearly seem to be threatening
to raise the costs of a great many things to a point of vanishing returns if we
don’t back off and regroup. We need time to think, to find how to chart a
sustainable course. Just hastily throwing huge amounts of time, promises,
talent and energy, only to attempt to reinvigorate an endless explosion plan
that just blew up very badly, does not seem like a good investment. We
may
have new things to explore of greater value.
jlh