Phil,
I call it Capitalism Plus. The old rules don’t work anymore. Many of multiple persuasions are in denial about the lack of utlility for business as usual. Given the load on the planet and the desire for many to improve their standard of living we have to change how we do things. Change won’t be easy, since those that have made out well by the old rules will fight change. The problem becomes even more difficult because the new rules will be written as we go (pleasant or not).

Are we going through the beginning of birthing pains or death pains. I hope and will work for birthing. Pain there will be.
….

When organisms switch from immature growth to maturing their strengths and finding roles in new environments.

Wolfgang,

Yes, I agree.  But would you go for “Capitalism Plus Plus” maybe??

The natural systems physics points clearly to “birthing pains” as a time when new beginnings emerge, as “the main event” at the end of compound growth.  IF people were to recognize that the end of compound growth is always *the beginning* of what we’d call adult “life” some interest might develop.  

As you say we need to “write new rules as we go”, but the end of growth is when any organism switches from immature explosive growth to maturing their strengths and roles in their new environment.   That’s then followed by “the good life”, as the natural succession for living things of all kinds.

Everyone’s pessimism today, with our enormous ignorance of things, is clearly confusing the beginning of something big as “the end”.    Anyone can check that for themselves, thinking about any system in nature they consider to be “alive”.  Just ask, “When did it’s exponential growth end?”, and see what else is going on at that time.

Humans are so absorbed by their own little self-interests they’ve mostly lost track of “nature’s stories”, her stories of development and their profound events of beginning and ending.  They apply to big and little things alike.  Once you begin to ask about them you find it’s been a rather glaring omission.

People pride themselves in representing everything in nature to themselves as some feeling, image or explanation in our minds,  i.e. something cognitive and cultural.  That quite ignores what physical things physically are as themselves.     The sciences, for example (physics in particular), even define our information as being the one physical reality and subject of science (Bohr’s Copenhagen “uncertainty principle” convention, etc.).

So, the extra “Plus” is for the discovery that reality is real after all, and not just a theory!!

Isn’t that just a mysterious confusion, that people completely ignore at home or on vacation, but are very ademant about at work!

We’d need new rules for money, driven by recognizing what is called for at our stage in the physical story of our development.  We have not yet asked: Is “getting bigger faster” still “profitable”?  That’s the main question to start with.

One of the amazing clues to this I’ve been staring at for a while is that the physical limits of growth for economies are internal conflict.  That results from every growing part running into growing conflict with every other.

By the parts being good at avoiding conflict as long as they can, the threshold of whole system limits is when all the parts come into direct conflict with each other all at once.     That’s not good.

Then all the parts come into direct conflict with each other, all at once.

Economic theory doesn’t tell you that because the theory represents economies with formulas, and equations.  That represents exploratory growth driven parts as controlled variables in numeric relationship.  Equations can’t tell you when individually exploring parts of a system will begin to run into new situations and will then depart from theory!

Real physical systems are chock full of hidden “uncontrolled variables” like that.  They result from their learning parts exhibiting regular behavior that last only as long as their environments don’t change.

People often blame economics for not having a way to include effects on and needs from the physical world.  Even odder is that ecology also doesn’t tell you about it, as Ecology also makes nearly the same scientific modeling mistake.   Ecologists represent complex ecosystems, also composed of independently learning parts, with equations too.

So, I think “Capitalism Plus” needs the extra “Plus” to include recognizing that.  It’s part of the “new rules written as we go” that we will be discovering how confusing it has been for us.  We’ve actually been representing the complex realities of natural systems as being located in the theories in our minds.

It can become fairly easy to recognize the difference, actually, a matter of a little simple technique.  For some it may take more time and willingness.   It becomes a matter of recognizing other living systems on earth more as “partners” than “resources”.   It’s always hard to learn what to expect from “new dance partners”, after all:

you just feel so clumsy
till you find your own way of being responsive.

Living systems, like our economic culture needs to become, are complex things that act as a whole, developing by growth and maturation.  They all grow to join environments of other responsive living systems, becoming responsive partners themselves.

They all start with growth the same way we now use investment to multiply investments.  They all start with using surpluses to expand their ability to accumulate more surpluses.

That continues, for living systems, only until it becomes more profitable to do something else…  Then at that key point they switch to investing in another future.

Their learning parts learn that their profits depend on making their neighbor’s work easier too.   They stop “building up” and start “building out” there designs.

As they mature makes the start-up system they began with sustainable.   It’s a complete “switch” of the physical system purposes.

Phil,

see also abv. “Everyone feels it in the making”

ed 2/13/12