Category Archives: For teachers

For teachers, Natural systems

Waves of immigration, at growth’s beginning and end

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A 1995 article in the Wall Street Journal offered this vivid image and a good discussion of the waves of immigration to the US from various other parts of the world during the past two centuries.    They coincide with the great period of economic growth, and the radical changes in the economic environment as we went from the beginning of growth to its end.

Growth has changed from creating limitless opportunity for all, to creating unmanageable conflicts with the environment and within a society no longer upwardly mobile, perhaps in decline.    That’s a very different world for immigrants to come into.

It’s no reflection on their different cultures, necessarily, as each wave of immigration seems to represent an old culture becoming adventurous.    It may well also not benefit a society to accept waves of immigrants as it is no longer creating expanding opportunity for itself.  That seems likely to have little to do with the immigrants themselves, though.    Still, the wave of the 1900’s came to build a great society, and the wave of today is picking up scraps in a society losing its way and coming into great conflict with its own success.

One of the great stories of modern economic growth and its tragedy

The sad story of modern economic growth is that its formula for great success became its formula for tragic failure, all by itself, almost overnight, caused only by our neglecting to read nature’s signal to respond to our limits.    That formula for success during growth is the self-investment or “seed” principle.  You plant your seed to get more seed to plant.  You use your profits to multiply your projects.      Continue reading Waves of immigration, at growth’s beginning and end →

For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Scientific theory

How natural system bankruptcy works.

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Bankruptcy occurs…

when a system becomes unable to supply its own needs, and gets cut off from former supplies.    So, it’s a system that may seem to be working fine, but drifts over the line of profitability, and is abruptly rejected by its environment.

…when systems can’t generate “net-energy”

resource productivity * societal productivity < 1.0

From beginning to end environmental systems need to produce some minimal margin of excess resources as profit, to maintain cushions for everything.  Otherwise their parts will not have time to respond to shortages and their environmental connections break down.

Becoming both more costly to supply and more costly to run, to the limits of profitability, causes system bankruptcy, as it did for Rome.   Rome wasted resources on making its high society richer throughout its decline, as if that would reverse its resource depletion.

… disillusionment occurs and systems break into parts, to end their lives.

Continue reading How natural system bankruptcy works. →

For teachers, Mail & Comment, Natural Economy

Disaster Hidden by the Weather, a Larger Toll

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Katharine Q. Seelye’s “Year Packed With Weather Disasters Has Brought Economic Toll to Match“ by was in the NY Times yesterday.  This is my letter to her.

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I’m an economic systems physicist, and one of my favorite gold mines for hidden information about events is checking out what’s happening behind the news when more than one natural system of change is involved.  How nature’s systems work tends not to be reported, actually hidden from view *within the internal organization of the systems doing the work*, so you need to discover them.

There are two or three different long term trends behind the recent flurry of news about weather related disasters.   There are the long term trends of climate change and development in hazardous places.   There’s also a faster changing trend that began recently, also associated with severe weather in the minds of many people.

Disasters hit like lightning, like our emerging resource disaster too.

Continue reading Disaster Hidden by the Weather, a Larger Toll →

among best, For teachers, Mail & Comment, Natural systems, Popular

Does living in social networks change how we think??

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The WNYC radio program On The Media, with Brook Gladstone and Bob Garfield is always insightful, and this week addressed The Personal Impact of the Web, and how the internet is changing human culture & society.   There has been some question whether the dramatic changes in how people think and behave are good or bad, or just “change” that older generations feel left out of…

Of course it’s “all of the above”, and I added the following as a comment regarding how in an information age, social networks naturally tend to create their own realities to live in, with the consequence of becoming detached from the changes in the natural world occurring around them…

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"Cyberboy" learning that nature is now the network?

Bob & Brooke, Your ideas about how the internet is changing us are insightful and entertaining as always, but honestly, you’re missing the physics of it. The “internet generation” somewhat corresponds to the “productivity people”, the driving force of economic activity and growth around the world, and the internet is a major productivity tool, allowing us to control more and more with less and less awareness of it.
Continue reading Does living in social networks change how we think?? →

For teachers, Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, What to do

2nd Global Heart Attack, …lifestyle change needed

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We’re driving an underperforming asset to return ever more

Excessive demands on ANY relationship naturally produce systemic collapses, like we’re now experiencing.   I’ve been pointing to the root causes, in considerable detail, for many years.  Ignoring them hasn’t made them go away.

It’s like compelling a runner to run faster when their body needs a rest.  At natural limits you need to pace yourself, in response to the responses of the world around you.

It’s hard to grasp how we could have developed a world of expert designed systems that ignore that most obvious principle of survival, but it never the less is clearly evident. Our cultural belief is that driving the economy to produce multiplying returns is the ideal of economic stability.

Pushing too hard naturally leads to collapse

Continue reading 2nd Global Heart Attack, …lifestyle change needed →

For teachers, Natural Economy, What to do

Return to a world that works? Learn to steer!

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Jay Hanson’s post to EconCritique@yahoogroups.com that “Economics is rotten at the center: The “Math/Logic Paradigm.” was passed on to me.   He basically found that economics is a social construct, of ideals that can’t be discovered in nature, and prompted this [edited] reply.

Jay,   I like how you aim at finding the conceptual errors.   It’s a good clue that problematic assumptions are neither possible to prove or disprove, suggesting they are just social constructs or definitions, rather than principles of nature discovered by observation.

A still greater fault may be found in our expectation that the world follows our abstract models at all.  That nature would follow our social ideals itself seems to be a pure social construct unsupported by observation.   Our beliefs we construct of our own abstract ideals are quite unable to articulate many features of how the systems of nature work, so it’s a mystery we haven’t acknowledged it.

The art of steering, timing the world for the moment to act

Continue reading Return to a world that works? Learn to steer! →

among best, For teachers, Natural systems

Dogged by confused realities… the spirit of the hunt?

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It’s easy to notice that our society is enjoying the great benefits of “an information age”,

..but also suffering from lots of “bad information”.

I remember the first day I heard what the future internet would be like, I think it was in the summer of 1978.   My immediate response was that it would quickly drown in misinformation.   It has not happened quite the way I expected, as a “massive database pollution” of facts that could not be checked disconnected from their origins.

What has polluted the information network that way is torrential storms of unfounded beliefs, seeming to threaten our whole complex society.

I think we need a “spiritual” solution, the spirit of the hunt for our own errors and for what realities connect disparate views and beliefs.   Another name for it as an “information disease” is a “multiplication of languages”.   Disparate belief systems come from social networks, only unhealthy when they become increasingly disconnected with each other and the natural world subjects their beliefs are about.    All of us can make a list of groups that increasingly define reality in terms of their own social religion, the “fiscal conservatives” and “radicalized Islam” for example. Continue reading Dogged by confused realities… the spirit of the hunt? →

For teachers, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Transformation

Our great love affair with change

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Love affairs begin with the thrill of an infatuation, and there’s always a risk of neglecting what’s more important.   We’ve had a long growing infatuation with technology, and reinventing our lives over and over, for example.    Such infatuations become just fond memories for how a true love began, if it’s true love that emerges from it, of course.   Whether it’s the beginning of a true love or not, is the question, as for any dream of expanding promises.

life is a love affair, a burst of investments followed by refinements

Write your own story of a love, a dream of promises either kept or not, as hasty as a smile shining light into two lives or as drawn out as the dreams of mankind and our many centuries of wandering from one wilderness to another in search of why some loves do last. but so many just don’t.

Getting lost in infatuations is one way, as with dreams of wealth, and so making the great errors of expectation and so losing it all.  Our infatuation with rearranging our planet ever more rapidly, consuming it as we go, has really gotten the best of us, and it has to do with money.  What would get us to commit to being its partner rather than its ruler?  That seems to be the question.

Continue reading Our great love affair with change →

among best, For teachers, Natural systems, Popular, Scientific theory

My most disturbing finding

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The origin of this post, fyi, was a truly exciting insight, in the 1970’s as I started developing my new scientific methods for studying the organization of natural of systems.   I discovered how to recognize the eruption of new forms of organization in nature.   It’s a locally distributed process of contagious development, that people tend not to notice at all, or to call “growth” for the superficial changes in scale it is also associated with.  

It was quite exciting, to find that one could identify individual instances of nature’s general process of invention, from the self-patterned erupting changes identifying its internal and external relationships producing transformative changes in design.   You need to look for where there’s a distributed “falling together”, not a “pushing together”.  I had some training in improvisation that gave me a window of insight on how to open my perceptions up to observing it in the world around me.  

As it became easier and easier to identify, I began finding strong evidence of these “bursts of self-organization” seeming to be the “glue” of all transient organization and design in nature!   Then the question switched, to wondering: “Why in the world don’t other people see it??”.   Our modern world happens to be organized around sustaining its own ever more expansive self-organization… seen in our minds, as being a “constant”.    For more on the story, fyi, also see “a World SDG“, a proposed whole system balancing plan, using the first true scientific measure of sustainability  4/14/14  jlh   :-)

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How to escape the mental traps causing mankind to destroy its own future and much of our living planet, is not so hard…

…but takes exceptional willingness to discover how nature works that you might have been missing.   It takes learning to observe nature making new sense of things by herself, i.e. real change .

Watching organized change develop in ways that clearly can’t be following human rules or theories, and so intricate they could never be fully explained, frees a mind to drop its assumptions and attempts explain.  It lets you just study and marvel at what you find, giving you fresh ideas unpolluted with the self-serving social conventions people mostly live by, that are the problem.

Watching nature work, beyond the limits of theory, builds fresh awareness, letting us put our own perception in perspective, to see and correct our misconceptions. Continue reading My most disturbing finding →

For teachers, Mail & Comment

Where do you find the natural world??

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That’s something of a trick question, actually, as throughout history the natural world has had a “made up” appearance, and people have struggled a lot with establishing whether any perception they have is “real” or not.

People have created a great variety of ways to say that nature is a projection from “the mind of God“, in one way or another, for example.   Modern science represents nature as a projection from the “invariant laws” that evolved from a starting point in “the big bang” beyond our view.  That’s almost as unsatisfying as the religious view, though.

Lots of people have noticed how very strongly people influence their own perception of reality, resulting in our own views at least being largely just a “human mirage” created by each observer.    The philosopher/scientist, Gottfried Liebniz pictured a complex image of nature as composed of self-defining worlds that are whole and imutable unto themselves, sometimes pictured as mirror balls, that he called “windowless monads“.

Another approach combines parts of all the others, by allowing each to have some variety of its own “built in mistakes“.   Most of what our minds are able to conceive of nature is rather imperfect, including our belief in “idealized realities“.   They could be as full of mistakes in our own thinking about them as any other, and overlook the complexities of the real natural world and reflect just going overboard in simplifying things.

A “combined view” would retain the perception of the views of individuals being naturally subjective, somewhat like mirror balls of perception which reflect their “own system’s internal logic“.   What a camera sees is always colored by its own lens.   From that starting point a learning process would let them discover some of the important gaps in the initial natural view of reality our minds create for us.

Much the same applies to mathematical models.  Once you have the view of reality a model represents, reflecting the question asked that generated it, then you can “peer into the matrix” of how nature’s far more complex and changing other ways of doing things affect it. Continue reading Where do you find the natural world?? →