… It has meant that for centuries,
but why is it now causing environmental impacts?
Why would growing prosperity also now risk our
using up everything useable on earth, as investors seek the fastest growing profits achievable?
These threats are not because of politics, except for neglecting how little time we have left to act on them.
The need to save the earth is very popular, all over
the earth. Continue reading Growth is Prosperity
Gail Tverberg posted a very nice dicsussion of the question from her view of:
My comment on her blog was:
It’s wonderful that you’re addressing this topic, long overlooked in the “alternative” as well as the mainstream scientific communities. Gratefully there is a long trail of ecologists that bucked even their own peers in keeping the question alive. Simple observation tells you that in nature “something goes wrong”, quite a lot!
If all the kinds of natural growth systems were to maximize their growth as a rule, they’d ALL behave like cancers. Anyone thinking for themselves about it has to conclude something else is going on.
Continue reading What goes wrong when growth ends before its limits?
on Linkedin – Global Foresight – Future of Western Civilization.
Nicholas Beecroft • I’d like to invite you to take a look at an emerging series of interviews with inspirational Leaders at the evolutionary edge of our culture
Phil Henshaw • Would you like a real discussion of how and why our economies became designed for a different kind of planet than the one we live on?
Nicholas Beecroft • Yes, go on, Phil……
Phil Henshaw • Well, it presses the credulity of intellectuals more than informal thinkers. There’s a very interesting property of informal language, that the same words readily refer to either the objects of nature that are their subjects, or to the cultural meanings people have for them, that the words raise in their minds. For example “apple” is easily considered the “thing in your hand you might eat” and the “idea in your mind of giving one to the teacher this morning”.
The theme of the AAAS meetings next week in Vancouver is “Flattening the World: Building the Global Knowledge Society”.
There’s a method of “reality math” that allows “whole system accounting“, to combine both what we know and what we can know is missing. That’s possible for systems defined by energy conservation. Failing to include what’s visibly missing from our data, often how energy is being used by systems that act as wholes, seems responsible for much of why our global solutions are not working, but create even more problems.
With all our information, “new math” is still needed for
what goes on within natural systems still remaining in the dark.
The following is a comment on society president Nina Fedoroff’s editoral in Science about it: The Global Knowledge Society. I certainly agree that global networking potentially allows global problem solving, but… There are “very large holes” in our information. The general “Natural Systems Theory” behind this view is a versatile scientific method, based on using the implications of the conservation of energy to locate and help study the wealth of complex natural organization hidden within the eventful systems by which our world works.
This is an exchange with Frits Smeets on Azimuth, John Baez’s wide ranging mathematical physics blog. The original topic is the 12/13/11 “What’s up with the solar transition“, and why isn’t it happening when seeming so “logical” to so many.
See Also:
SEA Energy Accounting: far more holes than cheese 3/9/12
– Self-organization as “niche making” 3/25/12
– Principles for detecting and responding to system overload 9/4/12
– How mismeasures steer us wrong 10/26/12
The basic problem is that systems that are highly organized as cells of complex relationships and work by themselves, like the great proliferation of systems that develop by growth, the working relationships between their internal parts is untraceable. So other parts of the universe “out of the loop”.
___________
The exchange starts on that topic, and in the last two entries turns to the deeper problem of why the natural holes in our information about nature are missing from the physicists notion of a world describable by equations, or “phase space”. fyi, you might browse at the start and read carefully toward the end.
Continue reading Are the holes in your map helping you read the territory?
A response to today’s On The Media program (WNYC 2/4/11) on how social media is taking over our lives, pushed by perpetual growth driven giants like Google and Facebook, not to mention Apple.
Great program today, important subject.
Your conclusion that social media will now always be a global presence in our lives needs a major general exception. If you ask whether Google’s and Facebook’s goal of ultimate power over our choices might lead to ultimate corruption, the instability of succeeding at it becomes clear. Things that grow till their host dies, like cancer, don’t survive, as their “success” is killing their host.
Every kind of new culture or organism starts life with a process of compound growth, starting with a temporary process of seeking ultimate power. That universal start-up processes works by using products from its first tiny bit of control of its environment to continually expand its control of its environment, exponentially. Continue reading Did we turn “Big Media” into “Big Brother” ?
From a Pharaoh hardening his heart to confused children refusing to budge… complexly organized systems pushed to their limits often display emergent rigidity.
Things that develop their organization by new parts being added to existing ones, develop accumulative designs that become harder to change over time. It leads to organizational rigidity, that can either be seen as inhibiting change or enabling structure. These are aspects of the systems physics of self-organization.
Crystallization works by replicating a pattern from a starting pattern, that remains the origin of the pattern throughout the process, like the process that creates snow flakes of a single design. It’s similar with road systems, that as you add connecting roads it becomes both unnecessary to add more and harder to change the established network.
Even with advanced computers the world financial system gets built around trusted expectations, leaving a rigid imprint of past thinking in our models for the future. If it becomes unmanageable and overwhelmed by floods of new kinds of information the models don’t contain, the system is not designed to make any response.
Organizational rigidity is natural, and develops in any system built by accumulation. A bureaucracy may be built to be very efficient and resourceful, for example, in responding to the original scale and kinds of demands. It’s initial designs may have been highly versatile for the variety of problems it started with. It naturally becomes mired in inefficiency at some natural point of piling on ever increasing demands of new kinds.
Continue reading “Organizational Rigidity” as a natural limit of growth
How improving productivity always reliably made thing cheaper and easier to do, is ending. It naturally ends as any direction of progress does, if taken to its limit. Now we see our “productivities” coming into costly conflict with each other and the environment, making everything more costly and complicated, the exact opposite of what we expect.
It reverses an expectation humans have had for how to solve problems that appears to be much older than recorded history, as all of human evolution is a record of great leaps of increasing productivity, using less to get more. Becoming productive in cooperating with our environment rather than conquering it, no longer “productive”, is a very big change in thinking for us.
Continue reading Deep Change in Reality – Reversing Productivity of Productivity…
There is a recent discovery of just how much of our real economic impacts are not traceable from the information we can find. The problem is caused by the nature of self-managing systems, that in working by themselves they also don’t “report” or leave traceable information about how they do it. It’s recently been shown to cause a major undercount for the energy demand of business products and services, and would seem to apply to all business impact assessment methods.(1)
Continue reading Real Challenge for CSR Sustainability Reporting
The great financial crises of the past have occurred once or twice a lifetime in every banking society throughout history. Solutions to fix the problems that each crisis of the past exposed have all been like recent ones in one extremely important way. They’ve always provided temporary fixes that set the stage for still greater financial crises to come. That’s a sign that people have been asking for the impossible.
It allows the appearance that earnings from finance can keep growing in proportion to past earnings, without any goods and services involved.
A simple but seemingly valid overview is that our ever failing “fixes”, for our ever greater financial panics, all come from not realizing that our information models of finance are not the economy’s source of value. Models and promises to follow them can indeed extrapolate to infinity. That is not possible for the physical work of the economy that is the only real source of economic value, that the promises of finance eventually need to rely on.
When the economy grows from physically “small” to “big” relative to its resources or its own technologies or social organization, it becomes a trap for our financial system. The financial markets are designed to search for any escape from financial constraints. Investing for rapidly growing returns, when delivering goods and services is running into more complications, draws fast money into self-fulfilling speculative manias. They promise limitless profits, by exploiting gaps between the rules of money and the reality of a changing economy.
Money has real value only when it corresponds to credit for deliverable physical goods and services. The actual physical connection between goods and services and money, and our responsibility for the physical resource uses and impacts caused, are the same. It’s that our “use” of money constitutes our way of communicating our instructions for delivering physical goods and services from exploiting those resources.
Continue reading Ever growing wealth, its sources of fictional value.