{"id":1810,"date":"2011-06-28T14:34:30","date_gmt":"2011-06-28T18:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=10"},"modified":"2013-09-11T09:48:28","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T14:48:28","slug":"natural-organization-giving-things-scale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/natural-organization-giving-things-scale\/","title":{"rendered":"Natural organization, giving things s.c.a.l.e"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Fullerton posted “Hell hath no limits<\/a>” on how\u00a0Wendell Berry’s poetry \u00a0clearly speaks of the great error of economics, also discussed by Herman Daly, in overlooking the issue of “scale” as having natural effects far different than numbers do. \u00a0 My comment was:<\/em><\/p>\n

__________<\/p>\n

The different effects of scale in the natural world is indeed one of the more important but oddly overlooked realities. \u00a0 The subject could be powerful in helping communicate what we need to, if people give it some study. \u00a0It’s very good that you picked that out!<\/p>\n

It’s not just the quite curious omission of the subject from economics. \u00a0 It’s also a quite curious omission from physics. \u00a0 Physics represents nature as only composed of “number” on limitless scales, with no grain or scale of any kind except as assigned or reassigned at will. \u00a0 Even natural units of measure derived from physical\u00a0quantities\u00a0lose all the constraints of natural scale in how they’re used.<\/p>\n

It’s only physical things and processes, and the relationships between them, that have inherent scale as a part of their nature. Having not\u00a0generally\u00a0considered the concept of scale as a subject when\u00a0describing\u00a0nature, we shouldn’t underestimate the enormous effect on shaping modern science and our present image of the\u00a0natural\u00a0world.<\/p>\n

That omission of scale from the understanding of natural systems and relationships by science is also closely related to our failing to consider time as a process of change, but instead treating it as a directionless string of numbers, without scale too. \u00a0 \u00a0Representing both the objects and processes of nature as having no natural scale also seems to be the direct reason for why economic models confidently project infinite growing wealth by consuming he earth, without raising concern about having the wrong model, <\/strong>even as that expectation has clearly already failed.<\/p>\n

The deep reason why scale matters is that the physical world is made of “stuff” and not numbers. \u00a0 For the stuff of the physical world “scale” refers to the natural operating limits for the working parts of things, minimum and maximum organizational scales, inherent in the how their\u00a0complex systems<\/a> developed.<\/p>\n

You can have people large and small, but you can’t make people the size of a peanut or as big as a house. Those are “out of scale” for the natural structural design limits of humans. \u00a0You can make the same kind of true statement about anything else that exists physically. \u00a0 The working parts that a person is made from can perform the roles only within the limits of their own organizational scales.<\/p>\n

It may take time to get others to think and talk about it…, but what can pull these many threads together into a single rope is noticing the very suspicious relation between :<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. the\u00a0universal development sequence of change over time<\/span>,\u00a0starting small by increasing steps to end large by decreasing steps (as required for continuity),\u00a0and<\/li>\n
  2. growth and decay as the start and end for all organization in place,<\/span> such as required for all both living and non-living energy using processes.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Both require complexly coordinated sequences of changing organization to accomplish changing scale. \u00a0That whole narrative of succession in scale is what gets left out, just omitted, by representing nature with equations. Some of my references on it are linked from my Chapters of a Whole Event<\/a> that discusses each of the many parts of that universal sequence of development:<\/p>\n

    \"\"
    The general succession of natural development <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    As to Wendel Berry’s insights, you quote him saying:<\/p>\n

    “Among its other wrongs, usury destabilizes the relation of money to goods….”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    which is a matter of exceeding the limits of scale for the relationship between money with no inherent scale, and creating goods that does. \u00a0 Exactly why those two, then, don’t stay in scale with each other is definitely something to study. \u00a0 I think the need to find the critical difference between the mechanism of changing scale for money, and the mechanism of changing scale for goods.<\/p>\n

    Studying that can take you to a point of understanding why running our world according to a logic that has no natural scale gets in trouble, since real world we’re running does. \u00a0 That’s part of what Keynes was pointing to as well<\/a>, when saying that the critical problem at the end of growth would be how financial savings would continue to grow when the productive economy does not.<\/p>\n

    The ability of financial savings to grow by adding %’s would continue indefinitely, only limited by financially exhausting (and destabilizing) the productive economy is where it ends. \u00a0 \u00a0 The productive economy is unable to expand to infinity, as it has very natural limits of organizational scale.<\/p>\n

    My piece “Why finance has a bigger appetite than the Earth<\/a>” has a diagram and discussion one can use for studying the particulars. \u00a0 It traces the interaction between the two great pools of money circulation, the finance economy and the cash economy. \u00a0 It does take thinking, but if you follow the logic of it, keeping in mind that one has natural organizational limits and the other does not, how the relation becomes distorted becomes clear.<\/p>\n

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

    John Fullerton posted “Hell hath no limits” on how\u00a0Wendell Berry’s poetry \u00a0clearly speaks of the great error of economics, also discussed by Herman Daly, in overlooking the issue of “scale” as having natural effects far different than numbers do. \u00a0 My comment was: __________ The different effects of scale in the natural world is indeed … Continue reading Natural organization, giving things s.c.a.l.e<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,8,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mail","category-econn","category-theory","category-trans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1810"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2508,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1810\/revisions\/2508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}