John Fullerton posted “Hell hath no limits” on how Wendell Berry’s poetry clearly speaks of the great error of economics, also discussed by Herman Daly, in overlooking the issue of “scale” as having natural effects far different than numbers do. My comment was:
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The different effects of scale in the natural world is indeed one of the more important but oddly overlooked realities. The subject could be powerful in helping communicate what we need to, if people give it some study. It’s very good that you picked that out!
It’s not just the quite curious omission of the subject from economics. It’s also a quite curious omission from physics. Physics represents nature as only composed of “number” on limitless scales, with no grain or scale of any kind except as assigned or reassigned at will. Even natural units of measure derived from physical quantities lose all the constraints of natural scale in how they’re used.
It’s only physical things and processes, and the relationships between them, that have inherent scale as a part of their nature. Having not generally considered the concept of scale as a subject when describing nature, we shouldn’t underestimate the enormous effect on shaping modern science and our present image of the natural world. Continue reading Natural organization, giving things s.c.a.l.e