To transform the economy to become self-regulating will require our learning how to make accurate physical measurements of our environmental impacts, and associate them with the dollars spent that paid for them. That’s not yet being done, far from it.
Nature builds economies with whole working parts: people, businesses, independent service providers, etc.,. They only deliver their products if all their parts work together, like machines and operators making a working unit. Our traditional measurement methods have just ignored that arrangement of the natural world. Understand our impacts we need our units of measure to match nature’s units of organization, otherwise our errors of measurement become extreme.
The following short article was submitted for the June 1 “Energy” issue of the UNCSD Rio Outreach Forum, but too technical for those discussions.
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It would seem odd, wouldn’t it,… to not count the charcoal used for a family barbeque in its energy use, because a neighbor brought the grilled burgers and vegetables over from their yard…? That’s almost exactly what happens when businesses don’t count the energy used by their outsourced services.
They’re treated as having no demand on nature, according to the ISO 14000 and LCA rules. The real error is evident comparing estimates by the normal rules with the global average and finding nearly all of them far below average, a sign of missing data.
The true totals show dramatically higher levels of real impacts for business
compared with estimates using the standard method people are using
My recent scientifically recognized paper, Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) (1) shows a corrected method, but making sense of such a big error is still a problem. It’s evidently exposing some enormous blind spot(s). The new method used my work on how economies naturally work, with businesses and their services working as individual self- organized units. That’s the critical insight that allowed making a closed account with the parts adding up to the total. Continue reading Our curious missmeasure of impacts (and silver linings)→
Using a new paradigm of biomimicry
to create a global self-regulating financial commons.
This proposal was submitted to the Rio+20 Dialogues for comment and voting. See “News of the Commons” for introductions to the vision and the systems thinking needed. It’s part of the foundation of collaborative free markets needed for the health of the competitive free markets, as an element of Helene Finidori’s “Commons-Sense“. In this case to recognize that the profitability of the whole is threatened by a continued common investment strategy for growth, and needs a way to change to a common investment strategy for well being.
Nature systems initially develop using a “bootstrap” mechanism, growth, that continually expands their control of their environment. For any system’s own internal as well as external needs that self-investment strategy needs to become responsive instead ever more controlling to survive.
See UN Proposal to guide the UN SDG’s by this principle for OWG 7 & 8
Early version: Jan 2014 – A World SDG- and way to thoughtfully manage global systems This and the earlier versions contain a lot of good thinking…
the Most polished final version is a Feb 2014 proposal to the UN: A World SDG
There are quite a number of “systems of systems thinking”, that I broadly describe the history of in my entry in the Encyclopedia of the Earth on Complex Systems. Every science made up its own, for example, which are sometimes linked and sometimes not really linked much at all. The introduction to the “Natural Systems Theory” behind it, a scientific method for studying naturally occurring systems, is found on the research archive site. The subject could also be called “General Behavioral Economics” or for its focus on the complex development of local systems of organization serving as the working “capital” of nature and apparently all kinds of energy using systems, or a “General Systems Ecology” as another name for the same thing.
The thinking somewhat overlaps with “General Systems Theory” and “Complexity Theory” but doesn’t focus as those fields do on inventing theories for nature. The focus on theoretical models, that people have often quite ingeniously developed, if for creating a substitute way to represent physical behavioral systems. The study here is more focused on the organization and transformations of nature, the ones we cannot define. So it might then be called a “Real Systems Theory” or “Non-theoretical Systems Theory“. The focus is on studying actual individual systems of the natural world, in their own innate forms and locations. It still uses recorded information, but for study of where the information came from rather than how we can turn it into something else, using abstract models to represent it. Carefully defined abstract models are certainly used, …but mostly to help expose and clarify the quite different means and different patterns of organization found in the intermittent relationships we find systems around us formed by, and how they behave as wholes.
This change in thinking is a sometimes confusing problem, which also displays “systems thinking” (as a culture and language) as going through evolutionary stages of emerging forms, like the great eruption of new biological forms called the Cambrian Explosion. Here the struggle is to move from a “modeling” to a “learning” approach to the complex organizations of nature, and how that will settle will not be clear for a while. This site records but one example of the struggle it involves, but clearly one of the places “where the action is”, at present. ed 9/23/14
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Many “systems of systems thinking” represent the accumulation of an individual person’s work over decades, and may be original enough to not have apparent connections to other languages for how things work other than how they individually have learned to use them. So as a “discipline” Systems Thinking is a “silo” with lots of “micro-silos”. Being thrown into them is a little “sink or swim”, with little to grab onto.
Like most systems themselves, though, most people have some “starting point” for their organized way of thinking about systems. It might be the nesting of small operations/management units within large ones, for example, as you might find in studying how a business works. I look at those common units of organization as a “cybernetic body parts” to be use to help understand the observed systems around you. That treats systems thinking as a “learning process”, though, rather than as a a way to define the mechanisms of systems , though. Real systems work in more complex ways than our mental models can describe.
My main focus in on natural systems that are identifiable “self-managing units” of organization (natural systems). For them the “management” of the system becomes a role for the loops of relationships that are also the system’s “operations”, so operations and management are not separated, but the same. The loops of relationships define the “body” of its organization as a whole individual working unit. That definition by observation also provides an observable “natural boundary” to locate in the environment, and a way to define individual systems for research studies by their own unique shape and location.
Maybe the following summary would offer a kind of “life preserver” for the “sink or swim” task, that the somewhat unwieldy accumulation of my work presents. ;-) My approach starts with recognizing that growth, for a business, social or physical system, is itself a:
a self-managing system for building whole systems,
starting from a seed of organization
using existing resources in an open environment
that I can observe closely, and
helps me pick out simple models of working parts
to then better understand the full relationships of the things seen in their real contexts
importantly for understanding the transition between growth and maturation
when the system’s surplus resources change use
from first developing internal relationships to then develop external relationships
from first building the scale of the growing system
and then to maturing its relationships
Systems develop on a path of changing organizational stages
My materials are kind of scattered all over my site and blog.
Bill Rees asked some excellent questions about my submission to the Long Term Capitalism Challenge to use natural principles for managing growth to sustain the profitability of our economic system. I think I made good responses too.
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Hi Jessie –
Thanks for the opportunity to review your proposal.
I agree with your diagnosis of our economic malady but admit to struggling a bit with the remedy. Let me start with this sentence:
“When people spend their financial profits on good works it also [reduces the growth of money], with the added advantage when spent as for endowments instead of to compound profits, of doing a lot of good.”
Now, at the limits to material growth, the goal of policy should be to reduce the throughput of energy and materials to biophysically sustainable limits. So the above passage raises two questions. First, what do you mean by ‘good works’? and second, would the redirection of profits from investment in productive capital to ‘good works’ reduce total throughput?
/When financial earnings are not compounded to multiply investment, and the returns are not added to savings, it stops the automatic compound growth of investments. I’m using “investment” more broadly than usual, to make my statements inclusive, to include all ways in which money is spent with the intent of having it return profits. I then break spending and investing in components if I want to study the details, using a “figure 8” model. That’s a way to construct a global model of how income is allocated and returned as income, as a closed system with regulated money supply (Concept$).
/So, “spending” then means the opposite of investment, as money spent without an expectation of return, i.e. final consumption. Then “good works” most generally means final consumption used to maintain the profitability of the economy, as a universal good and necessity for survival. One thing that economists would recommend, it think, if the added spending seemed to increase aggregate demand, is to make sure enough of it was used for non-consumption expenses like to retire debt. The intent is to have investors treat their financial investments as endowments, and think of themselves as fiduciaries for the earth in general, to keep it profitable and using their money as the world is best served.
/Spending financial returns would reduce total throughput if it kept the funds available for expanding production systems from growing. How the restraining aggregate savings would affect the movement of funds between ‘producing’ and ‘non-producing’ investments I have not really thought through. One part seems to be that businesses would need to give their profits to their shareholders, to be spent, rather than to use them to grow while the whole economy is trying not to.
Our current growth course, growing resource depletion
Please leave comments for reviewers on The official competition entry at the MIX site (here too is fine for conversation). If you request information I’ll respond as I did for Bill Rees, and post it if it’s OK with you.
It’s a nice new version of the long series of proposals for using natural economies as models for better ways to organize ours, a kind of systems biomimicry.
General References: (added proposal references at the end)
I got very good detailed questions on the MIX proposal from Bill Rees, and posted my responses as Questions from Bill Rees.
For an introduction to the physics and general systems theory of natural open systems, see Natural Systems Thinking
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The Summary
A good goal for growth would be to end at a stable peak of vitality providing a sound capital endowment for life on earth. That would be better than ending at a peak of exhaustion, like other “tower of Babel” societies of the past such as Rome and the Mayans.
It can also be thought of as a change of “ism’s”.
It would also represent a change in form for our economic system, while still being the very same economy with the same people and rights, and reliance on creative innovation funded by investors. By giving profits an end purpose, of caring for things rather than just for multiplying profits, it woud give the whole economy a very different purpose. So, it can also be thought of as a change of “ism’s”. Continue reading Adopt natural system principles to keep economies profitable at their limits→
A pair of systems thinking posts on how why the natural way to reform capitalism and bring about its stable and healthy climax. is to turn the world’s accumulated investment funds (the savings of individuals) endowments for their owners purposes other than piling up more money. JLH
@Helen, My systems thinking aptitude is simple minded. Follow the medical practice that cannot fully undersatnd what is going on in a living organism, has no clue of the causation chain of all diseases, but they heavily rely on the self-corrcting and healing nautre of organisms and time as the only cure without telling us how it works. Therefore I see humanity as the disease, but as we are successulf as parasites and society is built on parasitism, it is is difficult to get the message accross: stop being a parasite and acccept that you need to work to get rewarded. Go bakc to the Garden of Eden, check out what the knowledge of good and bad is really about and accept that life on earth is not optimised for the life span of individuals, not veent a happy life, but on the growth of species and offsrpings in a growing variety which was halted by hmans presence and growth in number. Surely, that will not go on like that, Nature will teach you by taking sanity away from us first. the rest will be easy. We are already insane in pursuing excitement, show and appearances and covering up knowledge and giving up common sense.
Jessie Henshaw • @Ferenc – You said to Helene, “Therefore I see humanity as the disease, but as we are successful as parasites and society is built on parasitism, it is difficult to get the message across: stop being a parasite and accept that you need to work to get rewarded.”
Why it’s “difficult to get the message across” is partly the difference between “feedbacks” as “ratios” and “feedbacks” as “investment choices”. That’s what I had mentioned, to which William Ross said “You have succeeded in expressing it well and succinctly.” as “one of the more fundamental differences between how models of systems and real physical systems actually operate. Particularly for growth systems that represent complex construction processes.” Continue reading Why real economic ‘feedbacks’ are investment choices, and Keynes knew→
In Continuing the Conversation on Resilience John Fullerton offered a provocative summary and invited more comments on the subject that started with examples found from Bill Reese and Donnella Meadows of resilience as “a Double Edged Sword”, like either social or biological diseases that change to become resistant to treatment. My comment on it got to be 1000 words…, so I just posted the introduction there, and continue it here, where I also can edit it if needed.
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Hmmm…. I think I both agree and disagree with all three, Geoff, Dave and Ted. I’m sure they’d point out problems with how I fit the various issues together, the way I draw the bigger picture too, of course.
The reality we’re looking for will need crucial parts contributed from many different perspectives, as no one sees what a complex society needs to work by themselves. Given our particular dilemma, critical success-or-failure issues still seem to dominate though. I myself have witnessed several decades of everyone’s seeming helplessness, in devising an escape from the converging crises many people have seen coming, and are now occurring.
It’s very odd, indeed, that human society is very actively destroying its own planet, in the name of its own self-interest. What we need is something more like an endowment, that builds up, to then sustain things rather than ever grander schemes for expanding our demands on the earth, like a cancer. That kind of “progress” threatens both our host as well as ourselves, making us a fragile organism on an ill-advised quest, to “consume it all”.
We need to break away from how nature starts everything new, with a plan for becoming infinite.
Seeing it’s not going to work, we could conceptually just, “give that up”. Still we’d have to see how to do it, and evidently don’t. The situation is complicated by our needing to respond in the interests of our whole society, in a society organized around seeking self-interest. The threat seems to come from what most benefits individuals at the expense of society, that we institutionalized over the centuries, and is only now becoming a mortal threat to the whole. To survive, society more than individuals needs to break away from how nature starts up everything new, with a plan for becoming infinite.
Endowment is growth that then enriches its environment
Our solutions for instability are now for the first time ever, pushing the earth itself to the limit of instability.
The problem that we have repeatedly tried to solve it, but also repeatedly haven’t, has itself been an amazingly resilient problem. We think we’re so smart, but this one has been stumping us for a long time. The “solutions” to economic instability our culture of experts offers, again and again, are intended to bring lasting prosperity, but keep becoming very unstable themselves. They’re now also for the first time ever pushing the earth itself to the limit of instability in many ways at once too.
There seems to be no news yet. The recent 40th anniversary meeting at the Smithsonian on the publication of “The Limits to Growth” and the clearly most urgent of our many dire environmental dilemmas of our time, with little exception, has gotten almost no attention in the mainstream popular or environmental press. So you’ll have to hear it from a real scientist as to why.
The reason is that the mainstream press is limited to discussing social issues. That our means of sustaining our prosperity is rapidly exhausting the earth just isn’t one of them, as the resource scientists who study “the blue ball” actually “have no social standing”. There’s a fascinating history to that, that reveals some eye opening new science.
A nice place to visit,
Was a wonderful place to live,
with tremendous open spaces, and overflowing with natural wealth
Emmeline, at ethicalcorp.com was looking for recent innovation in sustainability to review for recognition. In a short email exchange she persuaded me to try to find a simple explanation again, for my recent radical discovery. It’s that our information on the scale of energy demands that business place on the economy is “far more holes than cheese“. See also
Thanks very much for your nice reply. If you care to consider it for recognition, last fall I published a long paper on the evidence of a true 80% hole in our information on business end product energy use and CO2, sorely needing attention.
We don’t have information on what supply chain people and business are doing, because they don’t record it or don’t pass it up the chain.
The study identifies a deep structural problem in what we know about complex business supply chain networks. We don’t have information on what supply chain people or businesses are doing, because they don’t record or report it up the chain.
In a contrarian way that large gap in our information is exactly what gets missed by a “focus on transparency and clarity and measurement, being more accurate”. It has to do with estimating known kinds of impacts that go unmeasured for lack of information. It’s only due to the nature of outsourced business services having evident impacts that are individually untraceable, and so provide no data to count. Continue reading SEA – energy accounting “far more holes than cheese”→
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
