The radical separation of humans from nature, our being so self-absorbed and seeing nature as defined in our heads rather than the other way around, has been a deep mystery for a long time.
My interest in it came from noticing how mathematics became our standard for representing nature but cannot describe or help us study what makes life so lively, the abounding creative processes of nature.
I’m not against math, a fabulous art, that does help us identify certainties, however, our desperate search for certainty is what seems to have betrayed us, splitting our minds between attentiveness and total blindness to our environments, having defined in our minds nature as our rules for how to control nature…
The search for answers in mathematics, the language of determinate relationships that science uses, has proved extraordinarily profitable, leading to growing human comforts that have also taken us to the point of our increasingly destroying the natural world. Our mysterious detachment from nature seems very directly at fault. The animation of life, its rich relationships, and creativity are all left out of the formula when people are guided by determinate rules. It’s something I’ve long studied as a physicist, having first noticed that every event begins and ends with some little dynamic transient of change.
I think part of the problem is that language was actually reflected our first highly useful systems thinking, with all its words and grammar arranged to communicate important experiences, designs, and relationships IN THE NATURAL CONTEXT. Math makes rules abstracted from a natural context, that are most profitable when offering easy ways to control nature without concern for the context. So they work great but pass on no information on when they are being overused. That is as clear in the simple cases and most extreme cases, such as the world consensus plan to maximize our economic growth rate, for regularly doubling the wealth we extract from nature while ignoring its rapidly degrading impacts on nature, called “externalities.”
But who is it that is blind to what, and how in the world do we face an existential dilemma evidently buried so deep in human consciousness?
Finding the right path forward
We see humanity’s deeply split personality, generous and playful as well as obsessed with expanding our control of the world but need to find its source. Then we will finally begin to make progress, to slowly dig our way out of the terror our powerful minds seem to have created for us. Somehow we allowed our truly wondrous designs to create a new world of enormous cruelty, following their promise of relieving nature’s cruelty. That’s definitely happening, and definitely not good.
One of the paths to a cure could come from studying the differences between how people behave in one or the other way. We might then cure the blind way of abusing our powers by restoring the principles of staying in touch with environmental contexts. The direct approach, helping others immerse themselves in the natural environments they are in trouble with, works great using an experienced teacher. The living systems scientist like Ostrom or Midgley do it by lead communities through a process of exposure to how their worlds work, leading to their making much better choices.
As parents we also talk to our kids that way too, helping them to understand problems of insensitivity to others. Every good family does that, but the children still grow up to follow the rules of maximizing growing profits and ignoring the economy’s ever-growing impacts. That very clearly defines the split between how people behave in familiar contexts, where they can feel the strains on relationships, and in the public sphere where they don’t. In the public sphere rules for profit give people only feelings of self-interest and blind them entirely to the enormous building strains in the wider world’s relationships.
I’m not saying that is the only strong force causing humanity’s spiritual separation from life, but one we can see plainly enough to realize we very much need to act on it, despite the difficulty of communication that recognizing errors in our plans naturally creates.
Modern society presents other special problems of communication too, confronting us with thousands of self-serving silos of narrow beliefs, personal, social, religious, national, and professional. I look at them all as “cultures,” the “cells of knowledge” we build to guide us on how to think, work, live, and talk to give us some local sense of security in a confusing world. Cultures are also a saving grace as well as a way to divide us, given how most are deeply rooted in what worked in the past, with authentic copies passed on from generation to generation.
Of course, individual people have individual saving graces too, to use in helping us climb out of the trap we find ourselves in. Some have vision, steady hands, charisma, moral clarity, persistence, or wonderful person-to-person good hearts. Those don’t come from theories of control, that betray our powerful minds. They come from the opposite, from our loves and cares largely cut out of the public sphere by the rules we blindly follow. Saving graces in our institutions seem harder to find. We mostly built them around ideas of expanding control or being funded by it, not on learning how to make free associations work well.
What it seems we need to rely on is family culture and their central one for all and all for one life agreement. I’d include in that both the home and work families we center our lives on, which generally make us acutely aware of the non-verbal as well as verbal cues indicating openings and strains on our relationships. That is the very kind of environmental awareness that enables our personal and family survival instincts.
That is what seems most missing from the public sphere institutions, seemingly blinded by following abstract rules rather than navigating relationships with the world. It’s not even that the world doesn’t act as a whole. It certainly can and does, as you see in the effect of managing a global economy to work as a whole. To feel where the world is going, and change our collective steering, we’d need to count all the global strains we have not been counting.
From a natural systems science view, every culture change is a growth process.
As with all growth processes, the start is small exploratory steps that if successful settle on some main direction, or directions of new development.
That development then either switches to refining its internal design and maturing its environmental fit, to establish a lasting way of working in its new world, or it starts breaking up for not establishing a home.
In a world like ours, changing ever more rapidly, as a rule, our cultures like our economies driven to redesign and reorganize ever more rapidly, we now see them also tend to split up and follow divergent paths, too, unable to predict or control their own growth as the old ways holding them together are torn apart. In the past we called it creative destruction. Now it’s become destructive creation and multiplying technology and investment disrupt social contracts and our ways of working multiple times in a work-life and driving growing angry discontent in every direction.
The problem isn’t growth per se, but not even intending to finish it, not heading for the steps needed to make the culture change of the modern world something of lasting value, to both our many societies and its environment.
My friend Linda, among many others, said “the problem is we leave out Nature, the true ruler of our destiny. This is the big correction taking place. But because we have left out Nature, we do not understand it. No system can override Nature.”
I told her “Yes, and though everyone is feeling the strain, not understanding how we left out nature we also don’t see what to do.”
What I’ve come to is one possible way to close the gap. There’s a key level of all our cultures that displays how everyone does indeed nature’s method of building lasting complex systems. It is in our familiar methods of doing work projects at home or the office. We start and finish them to give them lasting value. We don’t leave our work half-finished to get ourselves fired or divorced.
The normal way is to start efforts with some small intent and look for how to build on it, then discover that it needs to fit a range of intentions and fit with the world around it, making adjustments and adding details to finish it off for delivering a lasting service to family or clients.
In other words, it’s not starting but finishing things that give them lasting value, placing the key in the arch that lets it stand up, furnishing a home that makes it liveable, coming to an agreement that is the purpose of negotiation.
However, … the internet is designed to endlessly multiply information and exponentially change how we live ever faster, like the economy too, making ever-bigger changes in how we live, sure to keep becoming ever-more unmanageable and to derail sometime, making nothing to last.
Who’d think the host of “experts” the world relies on would all make the same fatal blunder that everyone at home or work knows how to solve??
We need to pass it on I think. There must be a way that the people who care to make things work in their own lives can have a say in our common lives. Every system begins with growth and our ancient cultures seem to have all learned from nature about how to make things that last, making nature part of our design!
_________________ “Natural growth” is nature’s way of creating long-lasting new lives, of all kinds.
Intro: How system responsiveness is expressed in natural growth is as anticipation of the opportunity to end growth by perfecting the emerging system. To do that, the system’s steering needs to switch from multiplying to harmonizing (i.e. maturing) its design and place in the world.
The figure below is something of a list of what to look for in any particular case. All systems emerge with compound growth and then variably navigate their futures. A talk on the core natural science for an ISSS forum on Oct 2, 2021, is on YouTube!; the research paper (1) below.
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Throughout nature, living systems of all kinds develop by a growth process with three main stages. The first stage is an explosion of innovations in extracting and capturing resources from the new life’s environment, furiously building the new entity with what’s available. Varied examples include a seed sprouting, humans sprouting in the womb, the compound growth period of businesses, economies, and cultures. It also includes the take-off periods of new relationships and all other emerging organizational systems with lives of their own. The second stage follows the first, exploratory and adaptive maturation of a new life as it finds its place and purpose in life, creating its first niche in the world by a slowing process that perfects the emerging design, to be released to forage the greater world starting its longer third stage of life, building wider environmental relationships to last a lifetime.
Genuine “thriving through transition”* can be achieved throughout, from extractive innovation to adaptive maturation, and then finding and holding a niche in the future, even lasting into graceful decline. This storyline for how new lives develop is also found at every scale of macroscopic life of every kind, making it quite a wonder that it seems not yet studied in the sciences, nor part of our general cultural understanding … It’s so much a part of all our experiences our blindness to it is almost as if we’ve been looking the other away, not seeing how living systems work by themselves distracted by looking for something else. Perhaps we are always looking at nature only for how we can control things rather than for how nature works by itself.
A scientific research paper on the subject (1) was presented at the July 2021 meeting of the ISSS. What contributed to its success was focusing on how people already know a great deal about nurturing and guiding new lives of many kinds, initiating and supporting their growth and maturation up to their release. But, unfortunately, we do not talk about it much because it’s quite complex and is naturally intuitive for familiar creative work we mostly do non-verbally. So our discussion of it has lagged far behind. Just think about the difference between the start-up and finish-up stages of any kind of work, and how the work switches from multiplying the early patterns and then harmonizing them to achieve a truly lasting result.
For example, we follow much the same natural creative growth stages in making dinner. We start making dinner by first exploring what might be put together, at first taking small steps, then building up to large steps, and then back down to small steps again to climax with finishing touches as we sit down to eat. Raising a child or starting a business are far more complicated but follow the same creative, exploratory starting than perfecting stages to finish. Growth also faces numerous challenges along the way. If fortunate and skillful overcoming the challenges can be a thriving process all the way, taking a living system through its immature then maturing stages to serve its mature life.
The figure below is from the research paper, the composite diagram of the general growth stages of new lives, illustrating the A, B, Cs of new lives. Individual new lives will diverge from the simplest common thread of development for all new lives. Instead, each will build its own life, displaying considerable variation on the paths taken as it builds its own chain of developments, confronting its individual challenges along the way. Every new life will first build up from small to larger steps, though, and then build down from large to small steps again to finish. So the two sweeping curves are just for typifying the normal course of the progression, also called an ‘S’ curve. So the shape might as well be shown as an uneven staircase of minor and major challenges if that were not hard to draw and too specific to represent the general pattern.
The best way of reading the figure might then be to imagine what thriving would be like for particular new lives making their way through the long series of challenges of ascending levels. Then to cement the generality of the pattern in your mind, think through the periods of struggle, thriving, approaching, and receding challenges for the largest scale, the new life of humanity we are building now! So far, its first stage of growth for modern civilization has been around 300 years long and is now facing an existential crisis for not knowing how to transition to maturity. That challenge is one of the things learning to verbalize the steps of growth can help with.
The most important growth challenge of any new life is the big one in the middle. That is the great challenge world society and the economy are having the most difficulty with. Having designed our world around making the first stage of growth endless is both the big barrier and the main cause of all of our multiplying world crises growing with growth (2), pushing growth too far and too accelerate too fast to coherently adapt to the most conclusive sign that growth is at its natural limits.
The natural path of escape is labeled “Turn Forward.” It’s the shift from focusing available resources on multiplying the initial concept to using them for perfecting our designs and finding ways to thrive in our new environment. That shift from thinking about the past to the future is what turns a new life away from multiplying its past to finding its future, discovering its greater purposes and roles in the wider environment. That is a very good kind of work, one that the whole world is abuzz with today, even though our institutional systems are totally unprepared for and dead set against. That’s why we most need to learn how to discuss the problem. Our institutional world is more built on talk than intuition.
The natural pace of change can also shift faster than it seems possible. Look at the figure and see how the “Turn Forward” corresponds to a “Baseline Inversion.” That is a whole-system shift in the direction of its change that can occur with almost no actual system change, an “inflection point.” Before that point, expansion of the system was in proportional steps of divergence from Baseline1. After the inflection point, expansion of the system develops by proportional steps of convergence toward Baseline2, to arrive at the end of physical growth at its new home where the new life becomes freed to be itself.
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Please do add comments to this article or email questions and comments to me at sy–at-synapse9-dot–com.
*Note: The phrase “thriving through transition” is from Trae Ashlie-Garen, expanded on here to apply to the full set of any of life’s transitions.
After inception originates a desire, a long struggle for change follows and then a fast breakout and establishment
– To understand these best, think of examples in different circumstances from your experience, personal, business, world, or in nature.
For the transformation to an Ecological-Civilization there’s the barrier of needing to introduce people to something very new. If we study examples of how transformations happen in our memory we can find ways to convince people to explore what’s possible.
the universal stages of growth and adaptation that create new systems with lives of their own, small, medium, large, in a permissive environment.
Studied carefully, it’s possible to use nature’s own method of building new systems to guide our long-term path, showing us how to move forward from growth. Stage One of new lives is the germination of a seed pattern followed by a start-up burst of development when the new life defines itself as an individual. For enterprises it’s the handshake that sets things in motion and its period of rapid growth. Stage Two is for a new life to find its lasting place, maturing as it adapts to both internal and external limitst, Arriving at it peak of vitality ready for Stage Three, its long creative life. The curves tracing this story line are highly generalized, as are the terms used, but any startup faces these challenges.
Once you get the idea it’s astounding how many kinds of familiar transformations, on all scales, follow this natural system-building process for new lives. For projects large and small we execute our plans first starting with a concept, then working it till it is ready for its climax environment, — individuation followed by maturation and fulfillment
The start of new life is a “germ,” “spark,” or “seed” pattern, a vision or a fertilized egg, that soon starts to multiply on its internal resource and organize its internal parts, usually in a very protected and forgiving environment. For a human embryo that’s its womb, for an Eco-civilization it’s the virgin earth, giving us whatever we wanted for a long long time.
Then along with a dramatic change of environment at the limit to growth, there’s a change of life — a “turn forward” to maturing to make new relationships. Like birth, the end of compound growth is a perilous change requiring a great change in relations, resources, and expectations, a big test of survival a system’s will-to-live. It’s called the “turn forward” because attention turns from extrapolating from the seed to making a mature life in the future, in a more challenging environment.
For our newborn Eco-Civilization, hitting the limits to growth comes as a complete surprise, and will take the emergence of a great will-to-live, and lots of work to pass nature’s universal test of survival for new lives. Most of the human population is still blind to the profound change at hand and thinks growth is life, and that overcoming our troubles will be like returning to the past. It won’t BE THAT AT ALL! We’re heading for mature life, which given nature’s ways could be far better.
As humans, we have distinct advantages for charting our course. We have loads of experience in giving birth to all kinds of systems and giving them lives of their own. Personal relationships are one, requiring that we follow each step in the process and making good choices about going too slow or too fast, among other things. Making dinner is another, needing to be lovingly imagined, assembled, and perfected to serve its purpose. Both home and office projects fit the model too, starting with a seed that grows and is made to fit into the world around it.
So the fact that large systems go through much the same birthing process as small systems is a new discovery. To manage the end of growth for our Eco-civilization will call for all our personal wisdom for what’s right to help us understand what’s too slow and too fast, among other things, for the transition to an Eco-Civilization.
It will also have to do with money, so tied up in driving what seems like a growth imperative for civilization to operate, but is really just a choice of what to invest in. And now we need to invest in better things, like #FAIR_Money.
Allows different people to think of working on different paths, which all work out together naturally. Small steps needed for bigger ones, big strategies that make room smaller ones, things to wind down, things to build up, temporary measures for both.
Based on forest of cultural succession. A very loose model, much of it misleading for transforming our growth system. Might be applicable to the progress of humanity through its long series of failed civilizations, making cultural progress all along. Might be applicable to the ebb and flow of the ‘forests’ of political and intellectual fashion as some of us stumble around trying to imagine the future and others find ever more dastardly ways to say NO.
A wonderfully intuitive model, starting with local innovation in designing for internal human needs and external responsibilities builds familiarity with the natural system model of cells in the environment, envisioned to extend to our whole world to take better care of ourselves and the planet. Join the movement.
The only way to address our global limits is with global coordination, and for many things global coordination is absent. The nine planetary bounds referred to in Doughnut Economics are certainly critical, but there are a great many others going unmentioned, equally critical. These include:
escalating disaster risks due to overdevelopment and climate change
the growing long-term economic damage to capital resources,
government problem-solving failures
growing governmental lust for power
aging & inflexibility of ever more interdependent and complex systems
growing social polarization, ….. and other great systemic world crises.
Here’s my long list of planetary boundaries we are rapidly crossing, my Top 100+ Global Crises Growing with Growth. It is based on collecting lists from high-level reports, the major crises getting brief notice in the news, and my own description of flashpoints of unsustainable systemic change. Here’s a link to the 2021 Global Risks Report.
It is my belief that these kinds of growing systemic threats can only be reversed by a movement of global business and investors choosing to shift resources from pushing the harmful limits of wealth to fitting in with a healthy world society and environment.
The FAIR rules act as an overflow valve, to redirect excess savings of passive financial income (normally used by investors to extract exponentially more) back to the free circulation marketplace of the pond to keep from draining the pond and guide investor self-restraint in extracting profits from the earth.
FAIR_Money sets a UBD, Universal Basic Distribution, a standard % rate at which investors need to distribute their excessive savings from passive income.
Fig 1. Finance adds funds to free circulation commons, but with strings attached for taking out more as ever-growing profits and escalating drain on the common pool, causing punishing inequality when the economy faces natural limits. To restore balance the FAIR rules ask investors to distribute accumulated profits to qualifying non-profits serving long-term societal needs. That would sustain the profitability of an economy seeking balance with the planet and our need for a good home. .
Title Principles of Fiduciary Asset Investment Restraint (FAIR), simple rules to restrain the compounding of unearned income to reverse the present worldwide continued overproduction of demands on nature and society, our great tragedy of the commons. Ownership comes with natural responsibilities.
Topic Compound investment (adding profits to investments) is required to get any enterprise going, but as seen throughout nature is only what starts things, not what makes them sustainabnle. If overextended what it does is globally multiplies the power of the owners of the world over all others, creating the great array of world crises of neglect disrupting global society and nature we see today.
Asking investors to take responsibility for bringing growth to a climax peacefully, tempering their greed for the common good, appears quite necessary for long term peace and prosperity, even if it still seems quite impossible socially. It seems to conflict with the absolute rights of blind ownership. Now lots of owners are beginning to see the grand catastrophy their habits are causing, and that society’s rules should reflect how people would like to live without looming threats in every direction.
Pitch Flatten the curve of growing environmental and cultural exploitation, to reach a thriving peaceful economic climax.
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Fig 2 The universal pattern of emerging systems that sustain their climax
Statement The world financial system has but one value, to use the earth and human societies to maximize the growth rate and concentration of financial wealth. That leaves out concern for the resulting matching degradation and disruption of natural capitals and human society. To secure the wealth of nature and humanity we must then have Fiduciary Asset Investment Restraint to prevent the rapid decline of whole system value, and secure a good home for ourselves.
In all fairness, FAIR is just one appealing, comprehensive, and eminently fair way to rebalance the compounding of profits consistent with the long term interests of the earth and humanity. There are also tax and negative interest rate means of “topping off” excess passive savings to restore global balance. The value of FAIR is its focus on everyone’s shared duty to serve common interests. It would of course be backed up by legal penalties and alternate means of distributing excess financial savings, once people see the real need to change our way of living. Of course, all three means could be combined, perhaps led by FAIR distributions by individuals accepting their natural fiduciary duty to care for the earth.
FAIR rules would also only gradually reduce the financial imbalance caused by compound investing, and adjusted to not stifle individual financial creativity as it limits punishing demands on nature and society. Spending a fixed annual share of accumulated profits from investments in times of severe imbalance like today, torturing nature and tormenting wide sectors of humanity, would give investors global guidance on how to value the gifts of nature and human society. One must also caution against the use of FAIR distributions for just reliving symptoms of the systemic overaccumulation of savings, as simple symptom relief would fail to steer people’s lives onto sustainable paths. For example, food and services should be offered, but take a back seat to strong socially led education and self-organization efforts.
This is actually a strategy first discussed by JM Keynes in Chapter 16 iii & iv of his General Theory. I’ve interpreted it as an “overflow valve” for excess financial savings to relieve unhealthy burdens on the earth system, dialing back unsustainable extractive investment and relieving the whole economy’s pressure on all our cultural and planetary bounds.
The degree of relief from excess demands on the system would be adjusted with on experience, starting at 10% a year of accumulated for argument sake. That rate would most often not increase wealth distribution to undermine the individual life styles, just skimm off the top. The rate would be adjusted to gradually stabilize the economy’s impacts on earth and society at a comfortable level, both for long term profit and to treat a living world with respect.
In the end, finance would stabilize to generate steady flow of profits for personal and priority needs, the economy thriving as a continually innovating cash-cow business enterprise. In Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, the equivalent would be for the rich farmer to see the error of killing the commons, and devote his excess cattle to relieve community suffering, hosting periodic feasts to save the commons and bring the community together, seeing their right to become a welcome hero for giving up the role as the devil himself.
Need Even ignoring the COVID pandemic, the world faces a considerable growing plague of plagues from centuries of growth putting excessive demands on societies and the environment. A sobering list of The Top 100 World Crises Growing with Growth illustrates the problem. While mainstream finance is starting to recognize the need to not just maximize profits at any cost, so far that has largely been only to factoring the risks to ever-growing profits, not harm to our future. Since maximizing the compounding of profits seems to be the real problem, a new way to do it doesn’t really solve the core problem. It also ignores the very numerous other global crises threatening our future, exposing the grand “tragedy of the commons” of global overinvestment for which we are responsible.
Is that partly a matter of the kind of investment we built civilization with? Of course. A tree can’t change its own trunk, roots, and branches though, only slow the new branches to halt destabilizing overgrowth, if it’s not too late. So we should expect a natural Fiduciary Duty for investors and businesses to develop, to the best of their ability, and guided by the progress of the global crisis. That is a way for responsible investing to become universal without expecting investors and businesses making their decisions to understand all the up and downstream impacts on others or the system’s pressures on its whole range of planetary boundaries. In a way, both forgiving and frustrating, the research on global measures of our economic impacts (Henshaw 2011 Systems Energy Assessment) strongly suggests that causation for whole system impacts is so widely distributed it’s generally necessary to consider them as equally distributed per share of the economy, like today’s nominal average CO2 Emissions of 0.26 kg (0.6 lb) attributed to every $ of GDP PPP. Understanding the CO2 has both historically and currently increased in lockstep with the world economy shows the real problem that forces us to remove the growth imperitive as part of responding to climate change.
Fig 3 the history of Atmospheric CO2, with fixed growth rates from 1780 to 1940 and 1960 to the present
The main determinant of success for FAIR distribution of excess savings is not just the relief of pressure on the global commons it would bring. What matters as much is whether the money is well spent, and delivers “good works” of long term value. The expectation is that people with accumulated profits to distribute, with some technical guidance, would have an “eye for value” and see what the world needs to be successful, having demonstrated a comparable “eye for value” to make themselves successful.
Spending to serve the common interest presents the same kind of creative investment problem only looked at in a new way. FAIR spending is an investment decision for serving the system as a whole, that will be returned with profits of other kinds you couldn’t buy. That is the same way a family benefits from spending savings on educating its children. That is saved profits well spent. It’s a question of “feeding” the world something nourishing, not “controlling” it.
Well spent, FAIR distributions would teach both people and institutions about the patterns of growth in nature, and how investment at the limits is returned manyfold.
Because the FAIR spending of assets is something of a new investment field, it would need guidance and support from economic research and modeling. Also needed is a connection with the social networking of practice communities, both to guide to creating lasting value. Initially, it would be a voluntary adherence to a community principle, and then later formalized to be more widely applied. With new proposals for expansive strategies, the devil is generally in the details so serious economic modeling and rulemaking study to explore options. The scientific study of how finance is coupling with its growing planetary impacts, reliable sponsorship, and teamwork in building the global movement are all critical.
The hope is that the principles are practical and clear enough that they could spread naturally and become socially expected. Even connecting idea that growth is responsible for our problems continually racing out ahead of our solutions should be a task for a global IPCC-like scientific network, perhaps called the IFIC (International Fiduciary Investment Council). That would focus work on systemic research, to guide national organizations on rating impact investments for the commons. Someone will need to attempt to “qualify” the likely impacts of different kinds of for-profit and non-profit grants and investments. Coupled with each investor’s eye for value that could be relied on to steer the economy through its many present crises, including COVID, to a thriving and lasting climax.
Challenge: This proposed “human duty” (to go along with our “human rights”) for investors and business to devote a share of their financial savings to serve the common interest seems simple enough to define and discuss in principle. What’s harder to define is how much time we have to avoid the next wave of crises, as in the past, likely to be as unimaginable to us now as the present ones were before. We should “Build Back Better,” and with an eye to economic, planetary, and environmental justice.
Restoring the economy to maximize its long term growth is the most dangerous course of all, inviting a crippling systemic delayed response like the delayed responses to COVID-19 which caused most of the deaths. If we just restart the growth economy, already severely weakened, you might expect the kind of failure at the limit shown by the light blue upper curve (Fig 4). That choice amounts to no response in the end and leads to system failure. We seem already well beyond the sustainable limit and so only have a last-chance response, to turn toward the sustainable limit like following the purple curve.
Once the world realizes that businesses and investors do really have a natural duty to steer the world economy in the common interest we’ll find more ways to do it. The physics of responding to natural limits (Fig 4) shows that early responses to natural growth limits don’t significantly delay the approach to the limit. It is mainly delayed responses you need to worry about. FAIR principles, perhaps combined with other strategies for topping off excess financial savings, are today likely the only option for making a transition to a thriving climax without major disruption.
Fig 4, The high risk of delay in responding to exponential threats. From Models Learning Change (Henshaw 2010)
Origin of the FAIR Concept: A series of tweets 05/24/20 … and historically, from the work of JM Keynes, 1935 General Theory, Chapter on “Sundry Observations on the Nature of Capital” Chapter – 16 III & IV, describing why the natural financial climax of the economy requires financial savings to climax to prevent the very worst effects of capitalism, implying that the wealthy need to learn to spend rather than save their profits to preserve them, by making the system as a whole sustainably profitable.
This is a preview of my new submission to Ecological Economics Please have a look at and comment on the review copy FYI Some of the figures and captions are below
Jessie Henshaw sy@synapse9.com
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Abstract: Organized human and natural systems generally develop by an observable process of growth, with a beginning, middle, and end. Examples range from the growth of organisms, cultures, and ecologies to that of businesses, social movements, weather systems, even personal and social relationships, and many more. Close observation reveals organizational growth to be a progressive building process of self-organization. Most recognizable are its recurring three shifts in direction, each followed by a development period. That six-stage pattern can guide the study of a growth system’s internal and external designs, recognizable as a series of milestones along an “S” curve assembly line. That common model allows useful comparison of all kinds of natural and human-designed growth systems, using a diagnostic as opposed to a deterministic research method, keeping what “ought to be” in close association with “what is.” Discussed are the historical roots of the field, a set of pattern recognition tools, three brief pedagogical case studies, and an eco-economy view of our global growth and its natural time to turn.
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ow living systems develop their complex organizational designs by rapidly evolving self-guided growth processes has fascinated scientific observers for millennia. Natural growth also still resists scientific definition though. Perhaps the delay comes from scientists asking the wrong questions, looking for deterministic rules for nature’s creative processes, rather than generative patterns of natural design.
Here we start from the broadest patterns, like how growth processes are evident throughout nature, even in every kind of work people do. Growth generally displays a three-part development cycle of beginning, middle, and end, but like a tree expands on opportunistic rather than deterministic pathways. Our problem with understanding it, then, might come from having so singularly studied nature for the deterministic patterns we can rely on, pushing aside the study of nature’s indeterminate building processes.
Another commonality is that whether it’s the growth of a mammal, a business, or a snowflake, the ultimate end is a state of complex perfection of design. On close inspection, that highly organized end-state seems to come from having alternating periods of diverging then converging (positive and negative) development feedback, first getting growth to start-up to then turn to perfect the design as growth finishes-up, as if generating a framework then filling it in.
fig 1 – A Snowflake and its Central Kernel: Look at the layers of its kernel that built up around central dot. The first hexagonally differentiated shape you can easily see is still quite simple, but the next layers become quite complex. The six spines that emerge develop nearly identical filigree as if originating from an organizationally “entangled” first crystal core.fig 4 – Three stages and three turning points of natural growth. 1) the seed event, Image, and following start-up growth period (red) – Individuation 2) the turn forward event, Image, and finish-up growth period (blue) – Maturation 3) the arrival event, Image, and Climax life period (green) – Fulfillmentfig 5 – Economic systems need to use energy to harvest more energy. The ratio is called EROI, a ratio of returns to costs and has to stay greater than one for the system not to shrink or collapse. Usually, a new system’s first energy source, EROI-1, is consumed as the system develops a more lasting resource, EROI-2. Succession from one resource to another can also be repeated (not shown), like climbing a ladder, or it may fail.fig 9 – In a finance-driven eco-economy, choices by businesses and investors determine the directions of future development, predominantly based on what will be most profitable in the short term, whether by serving of quietly manipulating the markets.
Every economy is also an ecology, both a self-organizing system of mutual benefits which also relies on having positive net resource flows; both beneficial design and net material profits. Together these two faces of natural systems make a complex whole one can study from many points of view, but rely critically on all its parts.
Networks of mutual benefits are mostly composed of organizational, design, and qualitative relations, like that a cup holds water, or that a fish swims, or whether someone knows how to work with you, or whether a shop serves its local culture. Those aspects of design, organization, and qualities have no numerical definition but create the systems of mutual relations on which the designs of life rely, Some may be products of nature and others of fine arts and crafts: a fine meal, a delightful garment, or a meaningful film as inherent benefits of life.
Those benefits of life are also needed for the systems that deliver the physical resource flows that market price and investment returns determine the investment in, letting one calculate the budgets by which our world economy is managed. So to understand any particular living system, one needs a clear-headed understanding of how those two sides work together.
Without thinking we use natural growth for many common tasks already, simply by starting things to finishing them with a minimum of waste. In each case you “save the world” from needless excess consumptive growth in getting things started, wasting your efforts and the earth’s other natural and human resources.
Every kind of life, and kind of effort too, begins with building up a system of demands for available resources, to further expand on what built up before.
That expansion by building on what was built is the universal start-up process of nature, also sometimes called “extractive growth.” You see it very clearly in every kind of start-up, of a new friendship, a business, a career, a seedling or a life from a fertilized egg. The all start with steps that build up from what was built before. The build up that making breakfast starts with, for example, begins with the idea of food that makes you hungry, that then gets you to reach into the cupboard, and refrigerator for supplies, and the drawer or shelf for utensils, building a customized system and supplies for making your meal.
Nature’s integral; chaining start-up growth & refinement growth in preparing for a good life.
That process could go wrong, the way mankind’s way of using technology to multiply our making of things on earth exploded, and we now don’t seem to know how to stop. In making breakfast it might similarly go wrong if you got carried away taking out provisions. You might start with a small idea of what you need from the fridge, and add to that bigger ideas as you explore what there is to take out, repeating it to exhaustion perhaps, till the fridge and cupboards, pantry, and cellar, are emptied and all the family’s provisions in reach are mounded on the kitchen and dining-area floor, as you get hungrier and hungrier and your eyes expand way beyond the limit of your stomach, putting nearly all the family’s provisions to waste. The particular outcome is rare, but it is very true that once you get going with growing a process of growing, the process itself can become addictive. Today we clearly see in how we are wasting the earth in somewhat the same way, and love to be moved to tears and laughter by watching Disney’s Fantasia when Mickey Mouse learns turn his chores over to his broom with a magic spell, which gets tragically carried away carrying water.
starting things to finish them with a minimum of waste
Of course, we don’t usually behave that way at all, but at some point near the beginning of taking out provisions to use, switch to thinking about how to get to end of having a satisfying meal. We almost never have the exact end in mind either, but perhaps initially take out eggs and cheese to perhaps put them back and take out bread for toast and milk for cereal if you’re in a hurry. As you put things together you also do various smaller and smaller things you discover to do, to perfect the end result while also arranging the timing to get all the parts to come together at once, with excess provisions put away, all part of getting ready to sit down, perhaps with together with others in the family.
In doing that, rather than letting the initial provisioning of breakfast get carried away, we have “USED NATURAL GROWTH TO SAVE THE WORLD,” most often without really realizing what an enormous contribution to the community and your family was done by simply not maximizing the waste of all available provisions in the process of making breakfast. Of course, it’s also important to do and to watch for in other circumstances, a natural duty for living in a commons.
It seems like a little thing but is actually a very big thing, that we casually do for ourselves and others many times every day
that we casually do for ourselves and others many times every day
People are plenty smart enough to see that this “RULE OF NATURAL GROWTH” (also called “nature’s integral“), to finish up what you’ve started up doing before you make a mess for yourself and others, should also apply to civilization as a whole, and at every scale in-between. People do see that ALL development creates disaster risks, for example, and that boundless development would always creates an all-consuming disaster. Our minds still “get in the way” somehow, transfixed by fantasies it seems, and we just trundle along on the clear path to that all consuming disaster not knowing what else to do.
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How this would save the world is really something quite plausible. We already see in progress a great “change of heart” by businesses and investors around the world to join in on averting the clearly disastrous future now directly ahead of us. If that initiates a wave of common sense, with business and investors choosing to follow the wave of the “impact investing” community, averting the looming crises in the most direct way possible, and with much less government involvement. Following that wave of necessity to avert disaster would also turn our world onto the natural growth path for perfecting how we use the earth. You could ask yourself and others to join the wave! The choices of higher purposes include the Green Climate Fund, supporting various SDG goals. The real, macro-economic effect is to distribute wealth in the service of higher purposes while directing profits away from concentrating wealth and raising the economy’s ever growing demands on nature and humanity.
Various other journal entries here discuss more about “what to do”, there’s a whole category with dozens of good little articles and discussions of it. Still, the best way to learn about it is for yourself, from watching how all of life revolves around the variations in nature’s integral, seeing for yourself how ‘start-up’ processes yield to ‘end-up’ processes in taking things to the natural climax of releasing them for their useful life.
“Finance Serving Life” introduces an updated version of the transformation journey for global capitalism envisioned by J.M. Keynes. He first described it with a biblical fable he called “The widows cruse” (or “Widow’s cup”) based on the 1 Kings 17 story of Elijah asking for food from a poor widow with scarcely any, just a last bowl of flour and flask of oil. To relieve the poor widow of doubt Elijah tells her that if she shares her scarce provisions it will provide generously for both of them, becoming inexhaustible as long as she is in need.
Keynes’ use of the fable was meant illustrate to the wealthy that if growth ever became unprofitable, they could sustain a healthy economy by spending rather than compounding their profits, and have their profits forever be return to them. It illustrates a true natural economic principle of sustainability, that at natural limits to growth spending the profits from investments will become necessary to keep them profitable. That principle is also observed in living systems that repurpose their surpluses at their limits to growth, from being used for multiplying their parts to perfecting their uses and designs in order to thrive at maturity.
Today we can observe that using profits to continue to multiply the parts and demands of the economy on the earth and humanity have become excessive, in total effect impoverishing rather than enriching the both the human and natural world. In principle, though also depending on how it is done, relieving nature and humanity of escalating demands for increased productivity by wisely spending, rather than reinvesting profits would assure that the same level of profits would become everlasting.
Philanthropy and sustainability are among many such good purposes that those with a “good eye for value” might choose at a time such as the present when compounding profits to multiply the parts and scale of the world economy has become increasingly unsustainable. In macro-economic terms, spending the profits of the economy as it approaches the natural limits of healthy development relieves the natural world from endlessly increasing extractive depletion and disruption, while repurposing the use of profits for perfecting the economy’s systems and their relationships with the natural world, potentially bringing endless vitality to the whole.
One of the fine points observers often miss is that a non-growing world economy, using its profits for perfecting its designs for thriving and caring for the planet, would not become a stagnant “cash-cow.” Like a natural ecosystem it could be a thriving and stable system for continual self-reinvention, maintaining as much creative change, i.e. “creative destruction,” as is comfortable. Maintaining that balance of healthy creativity, avoiding both rapacious growth and stagnation, is then the steering job of the transformed economic system.
People are such wonderful designers of systems they put their minds to, and life offers so very many wonderful examples of successful transitions of this kind, from compound extractive growth to long lived creative stability, it is hoped that now that we are faced with the challenge, we could put our minds to it and figure it out.
The current slide set for presenting the concept more fully as a talk or webinar has the same name “Finance serving Life.”
— A presently elevated growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere directly linked to globalization.
— And resulting likely 1.5 degree C warming by 2030, TEN years earlier than the recent IPCC estimate.
— Plus a fascinating story of diagnostic data science discovery.
Yes, it is a somewhat radical approach, but is fully data driven, meticulous, and at the high side of the IPCC uncertainties, making it plausible. So it should challenge others to try to confirm or dispute the findings. Losing 10 years in preparing for 1.5 degrees C also makes this finding, if true, extremely urgent to respond to.
(A Major Edit of a 10/8/18 version, republished 4/8/19 – Jessie Henshaw)
The Path of Atmospheric CO2 – To understand climate change it helps to start with the whole picture, the great sweep of increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere shown in Figure 1, as the main cause of the greenhouse effect. Looking at where it began, you can clearly see the fairly abrupt shift in the trends at about 1780, also about the same time as rapid industrial growth was beginning, seeming to mark the abrupt emergence of fossil fuel industry that the rest of the curve clearly represents.
Look closely at the relatively lazy shapes of pre 1780 variation in CO2 back to 1500 (purple) and how that pattern differs from the abrupt start of the growing rates of increase (green line) after 1780 an how closely it follows the mathematical average growth rate curve (dotted). Note how the trendline threads through the fluctuations in the data starting from 1780. The way the data moves back and forth *centered on the constant growth curve* is what implies that the organization of the economy for using fossil fuels had an constant growth rate, of 1.48 %/yr. Hopefully that seems rather remarkable to you, but the data is clear, that the global economy has a single organization for behaving as a whole, as a natural system, with a stable state of self-organization in that period.
Figure 1 – The abrupt emergence of climate change with the industrial economy, evident in the constant compound growth of atmospheric CO2 PPM at 1.48 %/yr, from 1780 to WWII, followed by a pause and then the transition to the even higher growth rate 1.90 %/yr, That second growth spurt, continuing to the present, presumably reflect the modern reorganization of the world economy for maximum growth informally called “globalization.”
We know from the absorption of heat radiation by CO2, creating the greenhouse effect, that the CO2 greenhouse effect is heating the earth in relation to its concentration in the atmosphere. What implies that relation is close to linear, making the effect directly proportional to the cause, is shown in the Figure 2. The dashed brown line shows the slope of the relation, closely fitting the actual gradual curve, at least between 300 to 400 PPM, the thresholds that were crossed in 1914 and 2016 respectively, a period of 102 years. Atmospheric CO2 is increasing much faster now, though, so the next increase of 100 PPM, to 500 PPM, will be reached much more quickly rising at its current stable rate of 1.9 %/yr rate. If that rate continues 500 PPM will be reached in only 30 more years, by 2046. That large acceleration is the effect of the current higher exponential rate of increase. Of course, considering the rapid compound acceleration of the cause of climate change, and the alarm people are taking now, quite a lot could happen before 2046.
Figure 2 – The “relative heating” of the the earth to Atmospheric CO2 concentration, indicating temperature change has an approximately linear relation to CO2 (brown line) for the range of concentrations (300 to 400 PPM) over recent times. The triangles indicate concentrations in 1985. (Mitchell 1989, Figure 6 w/ added color)
The Annual PPM Growth Rates – Figure 3 shows the growth of Atmospheric CO2 (green) with the details of its fluctuating annual growth rates, to depict both the constants of the growth curve and it’s irregular growth rate interruptions. The individual interruptions raise lots of interesting questions, but perhaps the most important feature is that they are quiet temporary, as evidence of the constant behavior recovering again and again.
The upper curve shows fluctuating annual growth rates (lt. axis, PPM dy/Y) for the curve below, the CO2 PPM concentrations. The peaks and drops of the growth rate align with the small waves in the concentration (rt. axis). Note that the large drops in the growth rate that seem to snap right back to the the horizontal dashed red lines. That seems to show that they mark processes that absorb and then release CO2 again, as they do not seem to affect the average growth rates of PPM concentrations as a whole, around which the annual fluctuations homeostatically fluctuate.
This diagnostic approach is for raising questions like the above, using the annual growth rate to expose the dynamics of the curve for a somewhat anatomical picture. In this case it’s of the homing dynamics of the global growth system as it first hovers around the rate 1.48 %/yr from 1780 up to WWII, and then shifts to hovering around the higher rate of 1.9 %/yr as it stabilizes from 1971 to 2018. You might think of these two long periods of homeostatic growth rates in CO2 concentration as representing periods of regularity in the causal systems, global economic growth and the carbon cycle response, seen through the lens of atmospheric CO2.
You might think the large departures from the regular trends would be great recessions perhaps, that then “make up for lost time” on recovery. I could not find corresponding recessions, though, and for the great recessions I checked there do not seem to be notable dips in CO2 accumulation. To validate this kind of research one has to go through that kind of thought process for every bump on the curve, either a tedious or exciting hunt for plausible causes than then check out with other data.
What seems most unusual about the big dips in the CO2 growth rate (D1, 2, 3, 4, 5) is that 1) they do not occur after WWII and 2) they rise and fall so sharply and have no lasting effect, seemingly temperature sensitive as well as absorbing CO2 later released. I can’t say whether it is feasible or not, but something like vast ocean plankton blooms might have that effect, absorbing and then releasing large amounts of CO2. There’s also a chance the way the raw data was splined and the growth rates smoothed, to turn irregularly spaced measures into smooth curves, might also have unexpected effects. Whatever phenomenon causing the big dips was, it appears to have been interrupted by the rapid acceleration of warming that followed WWII, as evident in the smooth and uninterrupted rise in most recent and best raw data. Those are at least pieces of the puzzle that might help someone else narrow it down.
Figure 3. Atmospheric CO2 concentration (CO2 PPM)(rt. scale) and its annual growth rates (PPM %/yr)(lt. scale), showing the change in growth constants before and after WWII. The key evidence of these being different organizational states of the world economy (before & after WWII) is regular “homeostatic” (home seeking) reversal of trends departing from the growth constants. It is the post WWII growth constant state of 1.90 %/yr that is preventing normal policy process from intervening in climate change, and needs to be “recentered” on learning from nature rather than overwhelming nature for our survival.
Comparing the CO2 cause and degree C effect – The main purpose of Figure 4 is to compare the history of earth temperatures (blue, ‘C, lt scale) with the curve of atmospheric CO2 (green, PPM, rt scale). The CO2 PPM data is the same Scripps atmospheric CO2 data and scale we’ve seen below. The temperature data is from the HadCRUT4 records used by the IPCC. In this case the original anomaly data relative to the 1850-1900 average have been converted to absolute ‘C values, using a conditional set point of 14.6 ‘C in 2017. In a way it is as arbitrary a coordinating value as the others people use. It’s chosen here first for being a more familiar scale, but also so that 1780 initial values for PPM and ‘C can be determined as initial values for the greenhouse effect. Those baselines are essential for defining the exponential growth rates of the PPM and ‘C curves. The 14.6 ‘C value was based on an expert’s estimate.
Figure 4
Aligning the curves for Figure 4 lets us look closely to see if any shapes of the cause of the greenhouse effect (PPM) are clearly visible in the shape of the effect, global warming (‘C). Does anything in particular jump out? First might be the differences, one curve quite smooth the other jittery, both having wavy fluctuation patterns too, but of very different scales and periods. The first thing you might ask about is how regularly irregular the ‘C curve is seems to be. That variation is thought to be mostly due to annually shifting ocean currents, along with weather system changes and the difficulty of measuring the temperature of a complex varying world.
The ‘C curve (Figure 4) also shows the two ‘Great waves’ (#1 and #2) in earth temperature that appear to be independent of the greenhouse effect. The dotted red line was visually interpolated as the midline of the irregular but seemingly quite constant fluctuating annual temperatures of the HadCRUT4 data. The blue dotted line was added to suggest earlier large waves in earth temperature copied from the shapes in the ancient temperature reconstructions seen in Figure 5. I physically overlaid those reconstructions of ancient temperatures on Figure 4, drawing a continuation of the Figure 4 midline curve that fit the Figure 5 curves.
One might say the minima of the great waves in the ‘C curve display a trend somewhat like the general trend of the PPM curve, say from 1780 to 1980. The one shape that makes the two curves seem really connected, though, is the way the sharply rising PPM curve (the implied cause) and ‘C curve (the implied response) both start following a “hockey stick shape” in the 1980s. It even seems the shape of the ‘C curve interrupts the great waves as it takes off exponentially, breaking a rhythm that seems to go back many centuries. There is a possibility that the great waves represent upper atmosphere standing convection patterns waxing and waning, something that increasing convection intensity could interrupt. Perhaps that would help others find what the great wave cycle, or not. Since theory suggests the trends of both cause and effect have a linear component Figure 6 shows a linear scaling of the PPM curve to see if it and the ‘C curve can fit.
Figure 5 – NOAA (2007) 1300 to 2007 Northern Hemisphere record of temperature reconstructions. Measured from a 1881-1980 baseline. This it taken from a longer history keeping the units and adding a title and dates 1780 and 1880 (brown). That is the period after the greenhouse effect began before it was visible in the records of earth temperature. The red line shows an old NOAA speculation that warming developed earlier and slower than found here.
Scaling CO2 PPM to Make a ‘C Proxy – The reason to scale PPM to emulate the dynamics of ‘C curve is simple. The ‘C fluctuation is so erratic the variety of curves to predict its future is rather extreme, so people have been generally using a straight line. An exponential curve is not a straight line, though. So the quite regular shapes of the PPM curve, including its clearly measurable growth constants, 1.48 % before and 1.9% currently, do make it a prime candidate as a useful proxy. Even if the trend has a clear direction now we of course have to allow for increasing uncertainty over time. Adding to that are the plans for dramatically cutting CO2 despite a world economy dramatically increasing its production, a tug of war that could be interrupted by actual war or other economic downturn.
Where the current stable growth rate of climate change seems headed, knowing the PPM curve should be linearly proportional to the greenhouse effect, we experimentally scale CO2 PPM see if it fits the ‘C curve in a logical way (Figure 6).
Scaling the PPM curve to fit the ‘C curve makes a PPM’C proxycurve, hoping to fit the midline of the highly irregular ‘C curve from 1980 to the present. Both the units and the baseline are not determined, though, to produce the proxy curve in PPM’C = A*PPM + B, using a linear scale factor A and a baseline B. A third determinant is then finding a optimal fit between the very different earlier shapes of the curves. So basically I tried lots of things, and found my initial assumptions were mostly wrong. Initially I made the mistake of trying to fit the PPM’C curve to the midline of the earlier ‘Great waves’, and tried several ways until it was clear they were all wrong.
Then I realized those earlier great waves were really not related to the greenhouse effect. So my greenhouse effect projection might better be interpreted as coming up under the earlier systems, like it actually looks. That was purely a graphic device at first. Then when I adjusted the PPM’C curve to pass under the ‘Great Waves’ I set it to go through the miline of local fluctuations instead of the Great Wave departures. Suddenly the fit of rapid growth period became as perfect as I could ask for. I spent some time trying to figure out why, studying all the loose ends, in the end resolving that’s what the data seemed to say. That PPM’C curve then becomes the hypothesized most likely “real” rate of greenhouse effect climate change, and offering a much more narrowly regulated way for projecting its future.
Figure 5 shows both the best fit scaling of the PPM’C proxy curve (dark green dashed line), and its extension to 2050 at its presently stable growth rate of 1.90 %/yr (dashed light green line). Yes there are various uncertainties, but the threat of climate change so far has seemed to be from underestimating, not overestimating, and the findings do appear to be well within the IPCC uncertainties given the difficulty of projecting the temperature data directly.
I think it means that reaching 1.5 ‘C by 2030 is a much more probable estimate of the current trend than reaching 1.5 ‘C by 2040.
Figure 6 – The PPM’C curve scaled to closely fit the HadCRUT4 data and then projected at the homeostatically stabilized growth rate of observed in atmospheric CO2. How long this projection might hold depends on how robust the global natural and economic systems driving the growth rate in atmospheric CO2.
The Economy as a Whole – How great a new threat this acceleration in atmospheric CO2 pollution and its greenhouse effect are seems to rest on just how stubborn the global homeostatic regulating systems observed are. That could really change the climate mitigation picture, and help explain why there has been only negative progress in slowing CO2 pollution. So far is seems to have been neglected, with negotiation over mitigating climate change not seeming to take into account the organizational inertia and persistence of the global economic system as a whole.
Figure 7 shows a group of major indicators of the global economy that were selected for having constant growth rates from 1971 (the earliest data for some) to 2016. The GDP PPP curve in trillions of 2016 dollars is growing the fastest, and each of the other curves was indexed to GDP in 1971 in proportion to their relative growth rates. For example, since total economic energy use is growing at about 2/3 the rate of world GDP that variable was scaled to 2/3 of GDP at 1971. This device displays the steady relation between them called “coupling.” That the same proportionality of the growth curves is constant throughout it indicates each of these curves reflects the behavior of the same system. What seems to cement the view that the global economic system appears to be behaving as a whole is the visual evidence that the data of each of these series, like the CO2 PPM data we discussed at length before, seems to fluctuate homeostatically about the growth constant.
What physically coordinates the economy’s coordinated relationships between different sectors displayed here as growth constants seems likely to be cultural constants of each cultural institution, or “silo” of the world economic culture. Every community seems to develop its own expected way for things to work and change and seems to become the way the different sectors end up coordinating their ways of working with each other. That all of this is organized primarily around the use of the exceptionally versatile resource of fossil fuels then indicates that a deeper reorganization of the economy than a swapping of one set of technology for another will be involved. It should suggest to any reader just how very much of the world economy would need to be reorganized, and to be reminded that the last times the world economy was sufficiently disrupted to be reorganized were during WWII an the 1930s.
This topic is also the subject of a longer research paper. Science review drafts are likely to be available later in April 2019.
Figure 7. The global economy working remarkably smoothly as a whole system of coordinated parts, seemingly much like theory says it should, but most people don’t see because they don’t look at the behavior of the system as a whole.Figure 8 – Smoothed annual growth rates of recent world energy use and CO2 emissions, showing close coupling of their fluctuations with relatively insignificant trend.Figure 9 – Log Plot of Figure 7 variables with a 1780 to 2020 time scale. The backcasting of their exponential constants displays the convergence with the backcast GDP trend of four of them at ~1935 and with two others (blue circles) at ~1920. The effect implies the stable coordination of the parts of the global economic growth system established by the 1970’s was in the 1920s and 30s.
Work in progress… Below this line is old text that may be edited in pending updates.
It’s a powerful technique for understanding complex systems, such as the world economy, that behave smoothly as a whole. The most important observation is just that. The system as a whole and these whole system indicators are not separate variables, and the smoothness of the curves shows the system as a whole behaving smoothly as a whole over time.
From our local views of the world that often does not seem to be at issue, though it really is the main force behind all the changes everyone is struggling to adapt to. Individual businesses, cities and countries generally have a quite irregular experience, as their roles in the whole continually change. What the smoothness of the curves and the change in the system as a whole really means is that the world economy is working the just the way it is (financially) supposed to. It is being globally competitive the way money managers manage it, and continually reallocating resources and business to where they will be best utilized, resulting in most every part having somewhat irregular experience to make the whole behave smoothly. The uniformity of these global indicators also says is that their origins all point back to ~1780, when modern economic growth began. We have reasonable measures US economic growth from ~1790, …and so went the world!
Smooth exponential curves and the systems generating them are, of course, among the things of nature with inherent “shelf lives”, relying on systems of developing organization of multiplying scale and complexity, certain to cross thresholds of transformative change. In nature, growth systems generally develop to one of two kinds of transformation, stabilization or destabilization, the crashing of a wave that doesn’t last for example or the thriving business that can last for generations. What characterizes the difference for the emerging systems that last is that, while becoming strong with compound growth (like the systems that don’t last also do), they become responsive and refine their systems to stay strong. In economic terms that’s remaining profit seeking they “internalize their externalities” to mature toward a peak of vitality rather then failure. It’s a choice made in mid-stream.
Understanding what will make that difference in outcome for our global growth system will partly come from people getting a better understanding of how we got here, as shown in the Figures 1, 2, 3 & 4. The growth of technological civilization relies on ambition, creativity and resources, and methods that we could potentially change. How economic growth is largely managed by the application of business profits to multiplying business developments, what makes GDP to grow. If our decisions were to internalize our externalities that is also one of the things that might change, without really changing human ambitions, creativity or resources.
I’ve been observing the UN SDGs as a natural systems scientist since 2013 when I saw with some surprise that the one topic both Country delegates and Civil Society groups could agree on was the wording of the ideals for global development. Even when the Co-Chairs, Ambassadors Korosi, and Kamu, began persistently asking for the discussion to turn to means and methods it never did. Ideals are wonderful, but the strains the SDGs are responding to are still growing, as the global disruption of human cultures by the growing intrusions of the economies of the world powers continues. That’s a problem not yet to be studied and discussed. Why? Partly to be “diplomatic” and partly not having a model for human cultures as living social organisms that carry all our shared ways of knowing living. Still we need a way to discuss the rapidly growing strains on human and ecological cultures caused by accelerating economic growth, a global cultural sickness.
As growth presses the limits of the earth and challenges the world to ever faster rates of change, the damage to nature and human society is more and more lasting. That’s a conclusion you can reach from many directions I think. The communities the SDGs aim to help seem mainly deeply rooted old cultures that are now “failing to thrive.” That is a living systems problem, not a numbers problem, as the SDGs were designed to solve. Failing to thrive is more like a “lack of meaning in life” dilemma, requiring a different approach. It’s also a symptom that one can use to map the problem worldwide and begin to look at its real dimensions.
Our accumulated ways of knowing and living are stored only in our cultures
Failure to thrive seems to hit both indigenous cultures worldwide and communities within economies where “creative destruction” is leaving lasting scars, like rural flight or outsourcing that hollows out a region. One example is the deeply alienated culture giving support to Donald Trump in the US, distressed by the world changing so much around them. There are also non-thriving local cultures in North, Central, and South Africa, as well as in the Middle East and North, Central, Southern and Eastern Asia, as well as in Oceana, Australia, North and South America. It’s not “the same old thing,” but a truly accelerating global plight, seeming to be of all the cultures that didn’t welcome or were disrupted by the intrusive growth of the world powers.
Human cultures are truly the crown jewels of humanity, though, where most of our gifts come from and are on display. They are the unique individual species of the human ecology. If you think about it, there is no other place on earth for the safekeeping of all our ancient accumulated ways of knowing and living. Each culture either crafts its separate way of knowing and living or branches off from another. They are our most important gift, evidently now absorbing a great deal of abuse.
With each culture being its own “knowledge system” it keeps people from making sense of any other culture, or even our own. If you trace the evidence, it does check out. We get the large part of our ways of understanding things during early childhood, by what you might call ‘osmosis’. Some say it’s “too close for us to see,” or that our mental way of seeing is functionally like a camera and its lens, that are never visible in the pictures they take. Cultures also have a deceptive “cellular design.” Their ways of knowing and living are internally shared, and not experienced from the outside. Even with extended immersion, an outsider does not develop a native feeling for another culture’s roots.
The great challenge we face today is that growth is an ever faster process of expansion and change, *doubling* its demands on the earth and humanity every 20-30 years. That radical rate of increasing demands is what eventually overwhelms the adaptability and resilience of people and the earth. Living things are being pushed to keep mechanically doubling numerical returns for culture-blind investors, as if the earth was unoccupied.
That’s how the English occupied North America, a hundred years after the first settlements rapid expansion began with importing slave labor then a wave of settlers swept across the rest of the continent, as if it were unoccupied. Elsewhere the economic powers built systems for globally harvesting resources, placing overseers where needed to manage their access, as if there was no one else there. Today it continues with how global capitalism still relates to the world, measuring its success in rates of accelerating expansion alone, as if no one is here. What’s most surprising perhaps, is how very effective our cultural blinders are in hiding our blindness to our own and other cultures from us. That is, hidden until you have an indicator like the glaring disruptiveness of ever more sudden change.
So what would relieve our fast growing societal distress? There’s a new business model expressly for responding to it, to use biomimicry for how nature builds thriving ecologies. If interested there’s a longer discussion article on how healthy cultures are the foundations of healthy economies and the business model for nourishing our cultures, that I refer to as “True Public-Private Partnerships” (tPPPs) discussed more in the essay Culture, Financing for Development and tPPPs.
The new business model begins like any business, organism, or culture does, with a period of innovating and vigorous growth, making profits to expand its systems. When the environment responds with increasing resistance or stiffening competition, the new strategy is to choose when and how to switch from maximizing profits for growth to maximizing long-term profitability to pay it forward. That’s done by refining systems to operate in smooth harmony with each other and their world. It’s a more gradual process but would produce more integrated development and be more profitable in the end, to combine human ingenuity and natural design.
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Do comment if this gives you questions or ideas!
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[*] Jessie Henshaw consults as HDS natural systems design science, sy@synapse9.com, offering insight into nature’s processes of negotiating change. She uses natural systems thinking strategies (NST) with “action research” (AR) and architectural “pattern language” (PL) methods of collaborative developmental design. The start is from recognizing that organizational processes in nature follow a familiar arc, beginning with bursts of innovation, and then refinement, leading to a final release (IRR). That is not unlike how we all do home or office projects, in stages of immature then maturing growth then release, also seen in reproduction. The system produced is first “framed out” with innovations then “filled in” with refinements and “delivered” as the release when ready. Her current related research article is on how our Systems Thinking co-evolvolves with our Systems Making.
JLH
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
ow living systems develop their complex organizational designs by rapidly evolving self-guided growth processes has fascinated scientific observers for millennia. Natural growth also still resists scientific definition though. Perhaps the delay comes from scientists asking the wrong questions, looking for deterministic rules for nature’s creative processes, rather than generative patterns of natural design. 
