Category Archives: Natural Economy

how economies can work comfortably within ecologies

among best, For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Transformation

With endless exploding energy…

“Endless exploding energy” is quite temporary, of course.

Think of any example, any case where it’s not just the start of things.  We might start our day or a new business effort with a burst of “endless exploding energy”, but not really mean that literally.  “Endless exploding energy”, if you mean it literally, generally causes things to rip themselves apart, destructively. With our economy there’s little doubt we mean it literally, is the problem, inherent in the universal plan for “real growth” at stable positive exponential rates.

Think of any of the quite common examples, and then wonder: Why haven’t people been curious about it? Our whole design for economic prosperity involves using energy to multiply energy use, to take endless exploding control of the earth’s energy resources, for empowering our social relationships,

…to “take off”, and keep using ever more, ever faster,
the more we use.

The idea of our ever exploding future... literally!

I don’t know why I am perhaps one of the only living people to have had the curiosity to break free of the misconceptions leading our culture to be so committed to increasing our energy use by bigger steps the more we use, forever.  Somehow I both:

  1. noticed the signs of there being something deeply wrong with our knowledge of life, and
  2. discovered the universal solution for how to respond upon finding one’s own life rides on an exploding bomb of energy use, with no built in method of turning it off.

Survival is only possible if we use the energy it grows by… for something better,

The use of our own and the earth’s energies for further multiplying our energy uses, managed to explode at maximum rates forever,… is very explicitly managed for doing just that.   It’s readily apparent in our normal uses of money, if you look, found to be innocently posing as if designed to serve everyone’s “self-interest”. Continue reading With endless exploding energy… →

among best, Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Popular, Research & Measures

Is “Sustainable Capitalism” a half step too few?

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In “Beyond Firm-Level Sustainable Capitalism” John Fullerton reviews “Sustainable Capitalism” by Generation Investment Management LLP, as still not respecting our finite world.   Maximizing long term gain doesn’t make it sustainable, for example, given the difficulty people have had identifying future liabilities for currently profitable plans.   I add a graphic example, of how defining the world as what we know about it is deceiving, and results in:

simply enormous omissions from the information set we usually think of as needed for making good decisions

__________

It’s great to see such a solid critique of Generation’s “Sustainable Capitalism”, that on the surface seems like remarkably responsive to environmental issues as an investment strategy, far more than than ANY sustainable investment plan of ten years ago.   The whole attitude toward avoiding environmental conflict, as a business strategy, may be applied inconstantly today but seems to have really swept the corporate world too.

It’s nice to see you’re thinking is still a few steps ahead, too, and seeing their approach as somewhat of a half-way measure. Continue reading Is “Sustainable Capitalism” a half step too few? →

among best, Natural Economy, Popular

Growth is Prosperity

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Prosperity is Growth

… 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 →

Natural Economy, Natural systems, Scientific theory

Designed for a different kind of planet

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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”.

Normal language is about real things, the economy about abstract $’s

Continue reading Designed for a different kind of planet →

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory

Could “reality math” help the AAAS??

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The theme of the AAAS meetings next week in Vancouver is “Flattening the World: Building the Global Knowledge Society”.

Reality math combines the information we do have, with what definably remains missing from our view.

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.

Continue reading Could “reality math” help the AAAS?? →

among best, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory

“Organizational Rigidity” as a natural limit of growth

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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.

Accumulative designs become harder to change over time

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.

At the limits of Lucy’s organizational abilities, confusion reigned

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 →

among best, Natural Economy, Natural systems

Deep Change in Reality – Reversing Productivity of Productivity…

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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.

Musical chairs for earth as a whole - the natural limit of productivity

Continue reading Deep Change in Reality – Reversing Productivity of Productivity… →

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy

Real Challenge for CSR Sustainability Reporting

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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)

There’s a very “fat tail” to the distribution of physical impacts of business, usually much larger than what is traceable, and that changes the rules of impact accounting .

Every purchase uses the whole economy

Continue reading Real Challenge for CSR Sustainability Reporting →

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy

Ever growing wealth, its sources of fictional value.

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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.

Rembrandt's Christ Drives Money-Changers from the Temple, 1626

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. →

among best, For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural systems

The trap at the end of “Low Hanging Fruit”

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How’s this, for cracking “the mind wall”…??
(the supreme arrogance of treating knowledge as reality)

I’ve been showing people interesting ways to make use the difference between our mental and physical worlds for many years.   Here’s another.   If it hits an important principle, or suggests any way you might use it, I’d be glad to know and to see if I can adjust my language to fit your idea.

The natural end of “low hanging fruit” is “falling off the ladder”, a universal trap at the natural limits of reach, where rising risks meet declining energy to respond to them (if your plan is to keep climbing).

(as increasing your control of the unknown exposes environmental hazards naturally first omitted from any model)

The natural limit of "low hanging fruit", meeting the rising risks at the limits of reach, with declining ability to respond to them

Intellectuals in particular, have had difficulty accepting we can be quite certain of finding some things in the unknown, like the dual reality confronted in any observer’s mind, as it finds its world works differently than they think.

Continue reading The trap at the end of “Low Hanging Fruit” →