real cause; money multiplies, earth doesn’t

Money will multiply as long as there are profits, because people with money multiply their own profits that way.   As JM Keynes among others pointed out, when real productivity approaches limits, multiplying money will drive profits to zero. Driving profits to zero triggers waves of collapse, providing a means for our responding to our limits on earth.

It takes a little exploration to lead people to just how the present waves of money collapse are directly related to declines in the profitability of the earth, but that’s a major contributor and the first cause.   Correcting the various immediate causes won’t fix that first cause.   None of the other causes would have mattered if profits were still multiplying dramatically as compounding money needs to remain stable.

Do yourself a favor, read my own or other peoples’ writings on it to find better questions for yourself.    Explorers starve or get buried by avalanches for reading to pass judgment.    You can come up with open questions in a blink, so don’t turn any page without finding one.

Best,

Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸

The probable, desirable & the possible.

Anselmo,

I agree with you 99% philosophically, but note that there is a basic difference between the kind of environmental intervention we’ve gotten into from the kind that we started with. It’s a change in scale.

Our method of intervention in nature includes an automatic multiplier of scale. It may possibly be that there have always been people, even in hunter-gatherer times, who wanted to manipulate the environment that way. It wasn’t till relatively recently that we figured out how. Continue reading The probable, desirable & the possible.

Just curious

RE:[coteforum]

Allison, Hope this is responsive.

“! And please not just a theory.”

– The practical tools for measuring total direct project impacts has been the main thing I’ve raised here. The hidden impacts exported to others by making purchases, are regularly not included. To know our impacts and our choices we’d need to include them. As you observed it’s ‘sensitive’ though, and so we’d also need to address the moral dilemmas.

“I am not going to simply stop eating this weekend because my money will help a cycle I don’t believe in. Come on. I might complain, but I am part of this system too. We all are. Even you.“

– Absolutely correct, which means that drastic personal cuts wouldn’t help in the slightest, even if you could make them. Cutting personal consumption or dropping out won’t change how others are misusing your creativity. Continue reading Just curious