how economies can work comfortably within ecologies
Ever increasing investment in ever more competitive replacements took them.
Productive people get that way by actively learning how to be ever more productive… a process of feedback. Feedbacks start by accelerating… till they run into problems that slow them down.
Those who keep learning fast a little longer can then undermine everyone and everything else.
After getting the two research papers (1) that came from it through peer review, I updated the research notes page they came from, How to understand your Dollarshadow
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The reality is that every dollar is, on average, responsible for 1 equal share of the wealth and consequences of the whole world economy. So earning or spending a dollar earns you a share of all the accumulating consequences for the earth that use of the economy causes.
That turns out to be much less “hyperbole” and more an “accurate measurement”, than we are normally aware of. There are some very simple statistical reasons, having to do with world GDP/person being the world average consumption of all people.
The data and calculations are quite clearly illustrated on the Dollarshadow page now. You might find it a little extreme, that every $8 glass of wine or other consumption, unexpectedly, also buys you an added 8 pounds of CO2, to stay in the atmosphere for a couple hundred years. It would be a quite natural reaction.
Read my site (& your world…) with some of these questions in mind
it could help
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People get into trouble with believing the stories we make up for ourselves. It’s so easy because consciousness presents them to us as fact. If we then get attached to our stories we find it hard to change them as new facts have to be added.
To change that we’d need to stop being embarrassed about asking the “dumb questions” about things left unexplained. That hesitancy to question “the story” seems to be what allows them to diverge ever further from the truth.
It seems to be why in a world of interesting and caring people, as individuals, we develop ideologies that so sharply conflict with each other and with the nature of the world we live in. It’s quite hard to get to the truth when people are embarrassed to mention it, and we become socially committed to lots of conflicting stories. Continue reading In a nut shell, what’s wrong with our world
Finance starts with someone’s savings, and “makes” money by money managers giving some to other people with the understanding they will give more back. The borrower is left to find a way to use the earth to make more back from it, by any practical means available to them. Continue reading Why finance has a bigger appetite than the earth
I’ve been adding a introductory notes to my 4/1/10 post on Keynes’ “Widow’s Cruse” that seems to have grown into something I should post on its own too.
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The corresponding natural phenomenon he described is much more aptly termed “the youthful novice challenge” than by “the widow’s cup”.
It’s really not a “bitter pill” for growth systems finding themselves in unexpected unfamiliar environments, to discover their own objectives at that point, and a way to mature and thrive as part of a stable world. Every youthful novice goes through that basic life challenge in some way, and a great many live up to it. Continue reading Or is the end of growth a great “Right of Passage”?
There’s a nice report out of the NY Federal Reserve on Shadow Banking. That’s the ability of the great sloshing global pool of money to act as a world bank, without any safety net. I wrote an apparently effective note, got a nice response from the author.
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Dear NY Fed
A comment on your July 2010 report. Shadow banking is an emergent natural system. I’m a natural systems scientist who studies the difference between scientific theories and complex natural systems.
Equations can’t have independently learning parts, for example, but economies and other natural systems rely heavily on the adaptive processes of their parts. So, that adds to the long list of reasons for why abstract theories tend to have a short “shelf life”, you could say. Continue reading Shadow Banking, out of the shadow
It’s the organization of the whole that results in new and greater value from the parts of a system.
Investors like that, because putting money (energy use credits) in, to help get organized helps create more profits in terms of producing surplus energy credits. Continue reading Where does profit come from?
My 2010 research paper for Cosmos & History is just published. It describes how scientists can guide their models of natural systems to change along with the evolutionary changes in the systems being modeled, “Models Learning Change” (PDF).
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The classic case of systems that people in them will need to change their models for, is that of growth economies. Their growth is a process of rapidly evolving organizational development, with many natural limits as an environmental system.
Ways to anticipate when the ‘=’ signs of a model should be again considered as ‘?’ marks are discussed. A change the model is called for, for example, at the point when a growth economy’s environment becomes increasingly unresponsive to increasing investment. Continue reading Models Learning Change – published by Cosmos & History
On Nov 12, 9:08 am, Joan Sutherland wrote:
> Please propose Phil, how you – if you were in power -would legislate changes
> to your nation’s economy and environnmental policies to create the changes *
> you* want to see, without creating a dictatorship.
> joan
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Joan,
Well… OK, but if I were in power and could write my own legislation without anyone understanding quite why… wouldn’t I then BE a dictator?
I think the question has to be, how would a new way of thinking about the problem become of enough interest to people for them to see the importance of understanding how to make it work, a kind of different question. Continue reading What if I were in power, what would I change?
Re: Annie Leonard’s brilliant work in the “The Story of Stuff“, and the hiding places where nature puts some of the missing stuff.
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Annie, Hi, great work, I’ve always admired it. I’m a natural systems scientist, and… there’s a whole LOT of “missing stuff”. Closely studying the mystery of how nature organizes things into “whole systems” has a secret power, that any one part can lead you to… layer upon layer of the missing stuff. We should have a lot to talk about, but catching your attention is a difficulty these days.
Most people assume that once they’ve found one answer to a question, that’s it, and there’s nothing else to look for. But oh no, that’s usually the beginning not the end. Like, people see 1 thing wrong with money and think fixing that fixes every thing that is wrong with money. Nope, you have to look at things from ALL sides to find ALL the gaping holes. Just patching up the first thing that comes into sight isn’t enough. After a stumble you may tie your scarf and in a hurry “look smart”, but not notice you’ve been sitting in mud! Continue reading The story of the Missing Stuff
