A crowd sourcing proposal. Suggested to WNYC as a new form of news coverage
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From a natural history view, how the US news media reports on what’s happening of public importance is, well, entertainment news, that misses most of what’s actually happening and how it’s connected. Even Public Radio mostly giving us six shows a day of talk about all the same things that “everyone” is talking about. It tracks how the discussion is changing, but misses almost entirely how the world itself keeps complexly and dramatically changing by itself.
To open a LinkedIn community discussion in “Systems Thinking World”, on the “whole systems approach” and scientific method I use, for discovering and understanding natural systems, I offered the following lead-in
We might study anything identifiable, and growth curves in time-series data seem associated with some kind of growing system, developing from scratch. The usual difficulty discovering what’s going on inside them may be strong evidence that they’re organized and changing internally, not visible to or determined by their environments. If such individual systems exist, would they also have locations, external bounds of some kind, a beginning in time and an end?
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7/24/12
54 comments
#1• Jessie Henshaw • There are a few problems I’m trying to raise with this. One is the scientific difficulty of studying things you can point to, but can’t actually define. Science does better with “data” and numerical relationships, studying that as a ‘map’ for a more complex ‘territory’. Organizational change within individual natural systems isn’t readily mapped by “data”, though.
Is that one of the reasons there appear to be so many kinds of individual events and natural systems that display periods of essentially explosive creative organizational development, from storms to personal relationships, to social movements, disease outbreaks and swarms of new technologies, but science seems not to have yet identified that as a field of study?
12 days ago
#2 • Fabian Szulanski • What about agent based modeling? Would that be a point of departure for helping understand? Then some emergence, bifurcation and disorder could eventually appear.
12 days ago
#3 • Jessie Henshaw • @Fabian Well, that would be studying models for mathematical rules, not natural systems, wouldn’t it? To study natural physical systems, as if they were ABM’s, is more like what I’m suggesting.
Say you assume the natural world is like the big amazing computer the physicists postulate it actually is. Well then, we’re looking right at nature’s ABM without realizing it, and just need to discover it’s way of inventing things. We don’t have access to a “decompiler” of nature’s source code, though, do we? What we see are systems that evolve new organization by changing everywhere at once, somehow. It makes it appear that nature is doing fresh programming, on many levels at once, with nearly every process and event she creates. Continue reading Natural Whole Systems Thinking – philosophy & method on STW→
We keep leaving unaddressed that political will is just not enough
to overrule the power of money.
It’s in the interests of money to change course, to use profits to offer services to the commons rather than exploit it till it fails.
Even spending on astoundingly expensive arts an crafts, like “building pyramids” to ourselves, may not be an ideal service to the economy and the earth, but is a far better one than investing profits to multiply demands on it. It would generate earned income, which would then relieve debt. It would keep profits from being used to extract ever growing unearned income, for ever growing inequity and debt.
Yes, there’s a very solid case to be made to “do something”. We’ve also been fooling ourselves from the start about political will being able to overtake and control the behavior of money. Because for the past 40 years even discussing that subject has been avoided…, now if we don’t face the need for a more comprehensive approach our efforts are clearly doomed to fail.
There’s also a readily visible, but somehow counter-intuitive, strategy that works for lots of businesses large and small, and for self-organizing systems throughout nature. It’s for “the bosses” to recognize the system needs them to change roles, and become “service provider in chief” rather than “exploiter in chief” for the system to survive and thrive. A CEO of a large corporation or the managing partner of most professional corporations, needs to be the lead service provider to their network of resources, not an authoritarian ruler demanding ever growing profits.
How to apply that same principle to the economy as a whole is for the financial fund owners (retirees, NGO’s, governments & the super rich) to use their profits to heal the earth, managing their funds like endowments. Some already do, and that just needs to become universal. That reverses the traditional practice using profits to multiply your exploitation of the earth for more.
Rearming a rag tag gang with guns that shoot straight…
On the Systems Thinking World, Helene and others had been discussing the sustainability strategy now called “circular economy” aka “cradle to cradle”. That is a name change I was unfamiliar with that threw me off guard at first. In theory, the economy would be “decoupled” from depleting non-renewable resources if they were 100% recycled. That vision and intent are great. It needs to respond to the past great failures of the same purpose, though, how “sustainability” was turned back into “business as usual”(BAU), to become a strategy for maximizing growth. Continue reading “Wasteful Splendor” Astoundingly expensive arts and crafts→
I’ve been working for 30+ years actually, on the mysteriously omitted features of sustainability and “no-growth” economic models. It’s remarkably easy to demonstrate that the way markets work, multiplying money involves about equally expanding all the economy’s physical impacts on the earth.
So one is the perennial great omissions from the discussion has been how to end the endless “making of money” and so make investment growth responsive to natural finite limits. Another is to deal with the problem misbehaving free markets, which just record popular choices, is direct evidence of popular misconceptions… These are two very serious cognitive gaps in nearly all the “advanced” plans being discussed in Rio, is the problem.
I propose corrections for these in my two RioDialogues.org proposals, doing necessities first as a strategy, to avoid omitting them as the expedient popular plans keep doing:
They propose new institutions for adopting “commons based economic models” to make creating an sustainable world commons rather than development to solve the of world economic crisis, as proposed by Helene Finidori
The BIG news is that “the commons“ got a lot of fresh attention in the 2012 RioDialogues, from the UN Commons Action Group site and its Facebook page, supporting proposals that Helene Finidori (1) and I submitted (2,3) for:
“New institutions.. for commons-based economic models”
a common trust and place to enjoy being at home
Helene’s proposal (1) won the voting for the“Sustainable Development as an Answer to the Economic and Financial Crises” topic in the RioDialogues vote, and good recognition!
The idea is to NOT use development, as the solution to the world economic crisis, but to create new institutions allowing develoment efforts to work together, to serve the whole. It would create a sustainable world using “commons-based economic models”. The idea originates from the examples advocated by the Nobel laureate, Elinor Ostrum, as the collaborative framework that competitive interests need so the whole can thrive.
Helene’s proposal is found on the next page, or by following the links (1). Her new (Aug 2012) collected thinking on it is in,
To transform the economy to become self-regulating will require our learning how to make accurate physical measurements of our environmental impacts, and associate them with the dollars spent that paid for them. That’s not yet being done, far from it.
Nature builds economies with whole working parts: people, businesses, independent service providers, etc.,. They only deliver their products if all their parts work together, like machines and operators making a working unit. Our traditional measurement methods have just ignored that arrangement of the natural world. Understand our impacts we need our units of measure to match nature’s units of organization, otherwise our errors of measurement become extreme.
The following short article was submitted for the June 1 “Energy” issue of the UNCSD Rio Outreach Forum, but too technical for those discussions.
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It would seem odd, wouldn’t it,… to not count the charcoal used for a family barbeque in its energy use, because a neighbor brought the grilled burgers and vegetables over from their yard…? That’s almost exactly what happens when businesses don’t count the energy used by their outsourced services.
They’re treated as having no demand on nature, according to the ISO 14000 and LCA rules. The real error is evident comparing estimates by the normal rules with the global average and finding nearly all of them far below average, a sign of missing data.
The true totals show dramatically higher levels of real impacts for business
compared with estimates using the standard method people are using
My recent scientifically recognized paper, Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) (1) shows a corrected method, but making sense of such a big error is still a problem. It’s evidently exposing some enormous blind spot(s). The new method used my work on how economies naturally work, with businesses and their services working as individual self- organized units. That’s the critical insight that allowed making a closed account with the parts adding up to the total. Continue reading Our curious missmeasure of impacts (and silver linings)→
Using a new paradigm of biomimicry
to create a global self-regulating financial commons.
This proposal was submitted to the Rio+20 Dialogues for comment and voting. See “News of the Commons” for introductions to the vision and the systems thinking needed. It’s part of the foundation of collaborative free markets needed for the health of the competitive free markets, as an element of Helene Finidori’s “Commons-Sense“. In this case to recognize that the profitability of the whole is threatened by a continued common investment strategy for growth, and needs a way to change to a common investment strategy for well being.
Nature systems initially develop using a “bootstrap” mechanism, growth, that continually expands their control of their environment. For any system’s own internal as well as external needs that self-investment strategy needs to become responsive instead ever more controlling to survive.
See UN Proposal to guide the UN SDG’s by this principle for OWG 7 & 8
Early version: Jan 2014 – A World SDG- and way to thoughtfully manage global systems This and the earlier versions contain a lot of good thinking…
the Most polished final version is a Feb 2014 proposal to the UN: A World SDG
I’ve found that it eventually pays, to let my moral dilemmas hurt my feelings if I actually want to know the answer. I don’t ever dwell on emotional pain. I just know I can learn from it if I attentively listen to what it’s about. Our world is spiraling out of control, yet again, as if people had no clue as to why.
The Pentecostal anthem “May the Circle be Unbroken” contains a kernel of systems physics I hadn’t noticed until recently, in a spiral the circles don’t connect, but are eve more separated. It came to mind when a question led me to think about the heartbreak of alienation that people all over the earth feel so personally, when they realize that are living in societies leading them into desperate troubles.
That was one of the common recognitions among the generation born after WWII, and the popular impetus for the “counter culture”. The sense everyone seemed to share was that the post war culture seemed like it would just repeat the same sort of horrible sequence of global catastrophes it had just experienced, and might learn nothing from it at all. That time lots was actually learned from the experience, of course. Only thirty years later, though, world society is clearly creating conditions for the same scale of mega-catastrophe for mankind again.
It helps to face the fact “we’re doing it again”.
We have an economy requiring everyone’s energetic cooperation, running into destabilizing limits in virtually every direction at once, with no offer of a solution but “try harder”… That’s a total formula for disaster. It helps to face the fact “we’re doing it again”. The “circle” today is ever more broken.
Growth is a chain of events for creating an ever more broken circle. It's a construction process leaving ever more unbuilt, to be completed or the spiral goes out of control.
People keep making cultures and economies that spiral out of control. They abuse the love, cooperation and talents of their people, steering their lives toward performing tasks leading to great evil. But.. who is society but a consensus on common purposes? No one is “in change”. Still people somehow build great societies with all good intent, that contain an internal logic that is “broken”. Gradually over time we just notice them “spiraling ever further out of control”, each loop an ever further break from the past.
These aren’t metaphors, really. Growth is a spiral process. It physically builds upon the changes of to past to create ever greater changes in the future, diverging ever further from its prior path on every cycle. That we’re now losing control of it is generally felt. It’s also accurately observed in the “fishtailing” of over-corrections and panicked avoidance of terrible consequences, dodging the consequent failures of guesswork on which excess reliance was placed.
Economic planners are “shooting from the hip”, unsure what to do, because nothing is really working. The general progression is of events becoming ever more unmanageable. Having things spiral out of control is a very natural process, like some cosmic storm of misfortunes, that happens in environments. The error if there is one is our failing to notice it in time to reign it in, to make our “circle” unbroken again.
Bill Rees asked some excellent questions about my submission to the Long Term Capitalism Challenge to use natural principles for managing growth to sustain the profitability of our economic system. I think I made good responses too.
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Hi Jessie –
Thanks for the opportunity to review your proposal.
I agree with your diagnosis of our economic malady but admit to struggling a bit with the remedy. Let me start with this sentence:
“When people spend their financial profits on good works it also [reduces the growth of money], with the added advantage when spent as for endowments instead of to compound profits, of doing a lot of good.”
Now, at the limits to material growth, the goal of policy should be to reduce the throughput of energy and materials to biophysically sustainable limits. So the above passage raises two questions. First, what do you mean by ‘good works’? and second, would the redirection of profits from investment in productive capital to ‘good works’ reduce total throughput?
/When financial earnings are not compounded to multiply investment, and the returns are not added to savings, it stops the automatic compound growth of investments. I’m using “investment” more broadly than usual, to make my statements inclusive, to include all ways in which money is spent with the intent of having it return profits. I then break spending and investing in components if I want to study the details, using a “figure 8” model. That’s a way to construct a global model of how income is allocated and returned as income, as a closed system with regulated money supply (Concept$).
/So, “spending” then means the opposite of investment, as money spent without an expectation of return, i.e. final consumption. Then “good works” most generally means final consumption used to maintain the profitability of the economy, as a universal good and necessity for survival. One thing that economists would recommend, it think, if the added spending seemed to increase aggregate demand, is to make sure enough of it was used for non-consumption expenses like to retire debt. The intent is to have investors treat their financial investments as endowments, and think of themselves as fiduciaries for the earth in general, to keep it profitable and using their money as the world is best served.
/Spending financial returns would reduce total throughput if it kept the funds available for expanding production systems from growing. How the restraining aggregate savings would affect the movement of funds between ‘producing’ and ‘non-producing’ investments I have not really thought through. One part seems to be that businesses would need to give their profits to their shareholders, to be spent, rather than to use them to grow while the whole economy is trying not to.
Our current growth course, growing resource depletion
Please leave comments for reviewers on The official competition entry at the MIX site (here too is fine for conversation). If you request information I’ll respond as I did for Bill Rees, and post it if it’s OK with you.
It’s a nice new version of the long series of proposals for using natural economies as models for better ways to organize ours, a kind of systems biomimicry.
General References: (added proposal references at the end)
I got very good detailed questions on the MIX proposal from Bill Rees, and posted my responses as Questions from Bill Rees.
For an introduction to the physics and general systems theory of natural open systems, see Natural Systems Thinking
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The Summary
A good goal for growth would be to end at a stable peak of vitality providing a sound capital endowment for life on earth. That would be better than ending at a peak of exhaustion, like other “tower of Babel” societies of the past such as Rome and the Mayans.
It can also be thought of as a change of “ism’s”.
It would also represent a change in form for our economic system, while still being the very same economy with the same people and rights, and reliance on creative innovation funded by investors. By giving profits an end purpose, of caring for things rather than just for multiplying profits, it woud give the whole economy a very different purpose. So, it can also be thought of as a change of “ism’s”. Continue reading Adopt natural system principles to keep economies profitable at their limits→
New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context
