{"id":1093,"date":"2009-08-18T00:00:26","date_gmt":"2009-08-18T04:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=1093"},"modified":"2009-08-18T00:00:26","modified_gmt":"2009-08-18T04:00:26","slug":"when-taking-the-load-off-you-multiplies-it-on-others-what-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/when-taking-the-load-off-you-multiplies-it-on-others-what-to-do\/","title":{"rendered":"When taking the load off you; multiplies it on others\u2026 what to do"},"content":{"rendered":"

Efficiency & productivity relieve strain on you, multiply it for the earth. At the limits of the earth they multiply it on others.<\/h3>\n
\n

on 8\/17 Mark had replied: \u201cIt never really occurred to me that reducing the dependency of one thing tends to lead to growth in another area, increasing total impact.\u00a0 The same holding true for businesses.\u00a0 It occurred to me that over the years I have been a part of companies the expectation was that as my work efficiency increased so did productivity.\u00a0 [But that adds up to doing] More work at half the time. I am interested in hearing your thoughts on how to know where the end of these circular effects are and, if possible, to be successful economically without having negative impacts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mark,
\nYou seem to get the exact point, and the new moral dilemma that a whole systems view exposes. If we each increase our productivity, it takes US less resources to increase our use of OTHER resources. So it looks like we\u2019ve been understanding the effect of our having to do less to get more from our environment backwards, as if the effect on us was the same as the effect on our world.<\/p>\n

How you\u2019d get the two things we like, the earth and productivity, to be on same side of the ledger is the question. It would be in a non-growing economy where the more productive you became the less work you did. That\u2019s definitely not going to happen any time soon, is another part of the moral problem. Most of our social relations are organized around being competitive, and most business profits are used to multiply investments, and reversing that is not even under discussion anywhere.<\/p>\n

The ideal would be to have all the parts of an economy reach their peak productivity at once, before pressing the resource limits of their environment. That would be like the way an organism develops to maturity, with all its cells at the peak of their vitality and a long stable life ahead. Our growth economy is build to create ever growing imbalances between the parts and with their environment, to reach a climax at some peak of exhaustion instead\u2026 That points to other new moral dilemmas, and a real approaching danger. It seems nature is telling us we need to change plans.<\/p>\n

In any planning process if you see a necessity for a change approaching you do two things. One is to start thinking about what would need to change and how to do it. The other is to start looking for the right time to do it. I like to use the analogy of paddling a canoe, skiing, or driving a race car. When you see a turn coming you mentally prepare a move to make and then wait for the earliest opportunity to do it smoothly. So what that does is to both make it fun and upstage nature\u2019s alternate solution for approaching instability, having you capsize or crash.<\/p>\n

I think we may be a little late to make a deft steering response, since our whole culture is organized around choices to multiply wealth separated from making choices about our real future. So, I can\u2019t say where the end of that \u201ccircular effect\u201d is\u2026 If history is a guide, there\u2019s a very long history of this being a problem for us. We might well continue to push the limits of things to where they crash, over and over and over, and maybe never learn from it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of the most fascinating things about the frequent great financial panics that all growth economies have exhibited from the beginning of time it seems. People clearly see how they come from pushing the limits, watching what happens as trust inevitably falls apart, and how destructive that is. We just never learn from it somehow. So the end of the that circle will be when we actually DO learn from it. It doesn\u2019t seem impossible, but it also doesn\u2019t seem to have happened before.<\/p>\n

I think what would begin that is getting our measures right, for one thing, so we don\u2019t measure our multiplying impacts on the environment as reductions\u2026 for example. Once we have measures of sustainability impacts we can truly rely on we could put teeth in them by using them to qualify investment returns for tax treatment, making positive sustainability a requirement for investors being allowed to use more of their returns as they like\u2026 Then we\u2019d both know better how to do it, and have a lot more investment going to fundamentally sound sustainable design.<\/p>\n

Best,
\n\u2014
\nI had replied on the AIA Committee On The Environment forum 8\/15 to the great error in a post \u201cEnergy Efficiency\u2019s Great Potential\u201d, pointing out why improving productivity has always resulted in multiplying whole economy impacts, not reductions at all.<\/p>\n

COTE,
\n\u201cEnergy Efficiency\u2019s Great Potential\u201d, and all the other plans to reduce economic impacts on the earth using efficiency improvements display how very far we have all drifted from reality on the usual effects.\u00a0 \u00a0Efficiency improvements generally stimulate growth and increase, not decrease, total economic impacts.\u00a0 \u00a0That\u2019s what has been continually happening as everyone uses efficiency to improve their productivity.\u00a0\u00a0 [ed.]<\/p>\n

The actual truth is that efficiency has always been a primary growth stimulus, and always served to multiply our impacts on the earth.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0The illusion we are fooled by is that that efficiency improvement reduces impacts on the people doing the task involved, and we mistake that for reducing impacts on the earth.<\/p>\n

Improving efficiency has always actually been the primary means by which businesses engage in everyday price competition, \u201chave an impact\u201d in improving their \u201cproductivity\u201d to multiply the output of their products.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For the business and the economy it\u2019s a primary growth stimulus.<\/p>\n

Maybe the simplest example would be personal choices, say to reduce the amount of waste in your own food preparation in the kitchen.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The main effect is that letting you do more with less, using less raw food without diminishing your comfort.\u00a0\u00a0 What happens to the system around you is a)leaving more food for others, and b) saving you some money.<\/p>\n

That is primary wealth creation, expanding the economy and creating money from nothing.\u00a0\u00a0 Then the question is what do others do with the extra food supply and what do you do with the money?\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0To keep it you your choices, you either spend that money on other consumption, or give it to the bank to \u201cwork for you\u201d, going out into the world as investment to build more efficient technologies and stimulate appetites for their products.<\/p>\n

Absolutely any change in any natural system is something like that, with every action having a network of opposite reactions. \u00a0\u00a0What you really want to know is whether the opposite reaction is going to multiply or fade away.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d be glad to talk to people about how to know where the end of these kinds of circular effects is.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some of it\u2019s quite simple, based on how all kinds of systems begin with multiplying rebound effects.\u00a0\u00a0 One way or another they always upset their own environments, is the \u201csteering principle\u201d we haven\u2019t been paying attention to, \u00a0and the choice between a life story of growth to collapse \u00b8\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8.\u00b7\u00b4.\u00b8 or growth to maturity \u00b8\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8.\u00b7\u00b4 \u00af \u00af \u00a0at the prime of the systems life.<\/p>\n

People who don\u2019t ask, of course, are almost sure to keep thinking that the efficiencies that multiply profits are decreasing our impacts on the earth, the exact opposite of the truth.<\/p>\n

Phil Henshaw\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00b8\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8.\u00b7\u00b4 \u00af `\u00b7.\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Efficiency & productivity relieve strain on you, multiply it for the earth. At the limits of the earth they multiply it on others. on 8\/17 Mark had replied: \u201cIt never really occurred to me that reducing the dependency of one thing tends to lead to growth in another area, increasing total impact.\u00a0 The same holding … Continue reading When taking the load off you; multiplies it on others\u2026 what to do<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mail","category-econn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}