Mail & Comment, Natural Economy

Profiting from mayhem, is that what’s next?

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Andy Revkin reposted on Dot Earth my comment (below) on Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem? by Carlo Rotella in the NY Times Magazine.   On Dot Earth Andy also inserted other views, posting them together as Linear Resources + Exponential Demand = ?.

The gist is that it does indeed *seem* an economy designed to consume its resources ever faster would end in mayhem.    Except that’s not how nature always does it, making it a choice.   To solve it would change our institutions, but not would be a lot worse.

The mayhem option is there, and as I’ve discussed in an Profiting from Scarcity and Vicious spirals & relief.   From a systems science and sustainable investment view I have an article in the current New European Economy, “A decisive moment for Investing in Sustainability” also with discussed of Jeremy Grantham’s financial world view and research comments and links at big news… from Henshaw, Grantham &… the earth.

Appended are my two responses to the Dot Earth discussion, #12 “science is finding questions for which there are confident answers” and #28 a more modern view of Malthus.

A general map of emergence to decay for natural self-managing systems

 

What most people don’t adequately factor in…,

including Grantham, is how classically similar to a “Malthusian crisis” our collision with the resource limits of the earth is.  Our economy is having to adjust to the earth providing linear rates of supply to satisfy our built-in exponentially growing demand.  What’s hidden from view is that nature has two ways to handle that classic crisis of natural limits. Continue reading Profiting from mayhem, is that what’s next? →

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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…

_____________

"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?? →

Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Popular, What to do

It’s the leeches that make us strong!!

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I say it in that ironic way to emphasize the changing role of putting money into the economy to take more out.   It does make the economy grow stronger at first.   Standing outside the struggle of its creative struggle, letting your idle money milk it for more money, first has a stimulus effect on growth, but in real terms is always being being a leech on the system too.

While the system is discovering ever more opportunity to expand the more it expands, then “being a leech” at first does indeed make it bigger and stronger.   That corresponded to the period roughly from 1600 to 1950.

From then on it has successively weakened and foreshortened the future for economic system as a whole.    It’s the continuing use of money to demand ever growing earnings from one’s idle savings from the past, past the point in time when it starts accelerating the depletion of economic resources and opportunity, is the

“Mr Hyde” that automatically follows the “Dr Jekyll”

of magic productivity that being a financial leech begins with.

Continue reading It’s the leeches that make us strong!! →

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! →

Mail & Comment, What to do

What would release the logjam?

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On our largely ineffective defense of the earth
and of our own prosperity

My critical reading of events is that “everything’s on hold”, speaking broadly about our need respond to how we’re altering the earth.    As I see it, for as long as I’ve been watching every “hopeful response” that gets made has been gutted, when someone needed to add either a prominent or hidden “business as usual” escape clause.

The IPCC climate mitigation protocols are an example, saying that the costs are not to reduce the long term rate of economic growth.  It’s as if to say “OK we’ll fix the problem as long as we can keep multiplying the causes”.    People always feel forced to concede to money interests and when pressed admit they don’t know if multiplying the economy’s physical impacts will keep producing multiplying problems for us and nature, as we’ve been watching take place.

Where we all are today, spinning our wheels

Continue reading What would release the logjam? →

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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? →

among best, Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems, Popular

Urges, arousal, and Keynes’ “animal spirits”

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This is a comment on  The Concept of “Animal Spirits” is a Red Herring, a June 27, 2011 blog post, by the blogger “Lord Keynes”, on exploring what Keynes really meant by people needing the urge to act, as well as a rational expectation…

__________

Thanks for helping clarify the original meaning of “animal spirits” and helping bring out “the real J.M. Keynes”.    I agree:

Keynes uses “animal spirits” in the sense of “a spontaneous [human] urge to action rather than inaction.”

The sense in which his use and Descartes’, as

“the fiery particles of the blood”

are consistent is seen when observing that both would be referring to how people need to be aroused and have inspiration to act, i.e. to make emotional leaps in decision making, and not just form rational expectations.

That is indeed quite different from our having to be subjective in forming expectations with uncertainties.   As you say “The concept of “animal spirits” as used by Keynes is not even necessary to the modern subjective expectations theory. “   But then that is the subject you discuss, and seem to drop the question of what Keynes really thought was important about the need for “animal spirits” to allow people to act.

A related puzzle for understanding “the real J.M. Keynes” is his mysterious Chapter 16 of The General Theory.  It’s his concluding chapter to his grand theory of how to stabilize growth.  He oddly spends the whole chapter on the natural limits of his own model, however.    Continue reading Urges, arousal, and Keynes’ “animal spirits” →

among best, Mail & Comment, Natural Economy, Natural systems

Making love, the great gift of Mother Nature

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Having sex is the one thing Mother Nature knows best.   She is subtle and patient, and simply loves it.   She takes deposits of “true seed” or sometimes of “magic multiplying juice” and returns multiplied bounties in return.

Making love to Mother Nature produces new generations, variations on things to produce new seed, to then perhaps deposit within her womb to return multiplied again. Those deposits of seed or magic juice get her pregnant, in actual fact.   It’s what’s going on virtually anywhere you see her womb swelling all out of proportion, as if to burst.

Her womb does then burst, no illusions, with her new offspring.  There is no such thing as being “half pregnant”, “having sex without consequences”, or for man’s worst habit, investing in nature to multiply her returns and not having responsibility for the pregnancy involved.

The gestation after sex gives her new children to release, to enrich the lives of her older children, who found having sex with her a delight and whose seed she returns multiplied.   It’s her one promise, to be fruitful and to multiply the seed planted within her, while making only one simple request:

If you plant your seed in me, I will bear your children and they can plant their seed in me too.  It’s a promise and I will keep it.  But I need you and your offspring to stick around, to care for your generations and for me.   Will you care for them?   Will you care for me, and give me rest?   It’s all I ask for these gifts.  – m.n.

(click and see)

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 →

New systems science, how to care for natural uncontrolled systems in context