responding to Alex:
\nPhil, I liked your coded message. You mean a threshold like \u2018peak oil\u2019? Or the peak carrying capacity of the earth in terms of population? The question is, how do you propose to reduce demand? Right now, governments are doing their damnedest to stimulate demand to save the global economy from implosion. You\u2019re saying let\u2019s reduce demand. How? How is this going to work? Asking a question for which there\u2019s no answer is probably a good way to get no answer.\u00a0
\n\u2014<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAlex,
\nThanks very much. \u00a0My usual worry is not leaving people with questions, but getting none in return. Whether any answer about the future is more than half an answer, after all, depends on what question you ask. \u00a0 The best available answer to what “people want to know” is often only speculation.<\/p>\nYes, \u201cbeing able to see thresholds before crossing them\u201d would apply to \u201cpeak oil\u201d and to the carrying capacities of things.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For example, the rate at which a scalar peak like \u201cpeak oil\u201d is approaching is visible in the derivative rate long before.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
If you consider any development process any resource use curve goes through, there are five basic phases , growth, maturation, maybe a steady period, then drop off and decay \u00b8\u00b8\u00b8.\u00b7\u00b4 \u00af `\u00b7.\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8 \u00a0The point of diminishing resources is long after the point of diminishing rate of increase.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s generally half way up the growth curve, right at the switch between growth and maturation when the first derivative is at a peak and starts to decline.\u00a0\u00a0 Even before then there\u2019s the earlier point where the first derivative stops rising faster.<\/p>\n
Those signals of approaching thresholds of resource availability are often rather clear and reliable. \u00a0 They’re ubiquitous in life, and critical that we notice for our timing of every kind of chore, from making dinner to making love, to making it onto the bus.<\/p>\n
For unclear reasons people mostly don\u2019t know any more about them consciously, though, than reading tea leaves or astrological charts\u2026<\/h3>\n
In natural systems reducing demand is done by two successful means, a) running out things so you have to stop work, and b) finishing the work you were doing before running out.<\/p>\n
My visual image is that we have a dandy new concept for advanced civilization, a new kind of house to live in to make earth a comfortable home, only we\u2019re just fixated on making it ever taller and in danger of running out of construction materials before more of the columns collapse and before we get a roof on.<\/p>\n
How to reduce demand when we just spent a couple centuries practicing how to increase demand as the solution to everything does inceed seem to be a question with no answer.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Asking a question that has no answer can also be nature\u2019s trick way of suggesting you\u2019re asking the wrong question, though.<\/p>\n
I found that the Keynes and Boulding proposal for how to stabalize wealth at economic climax would do that.\u00a0\u00a0 If you think of investment as stimulating future demand, it\u2019s spending investment funds that reduces future demand, and lets an economy stabalize.\u00a0 The whole economy is designed to continulally multiply stimulus, however, as you point out.\u00a0\u00a0 All one can be sure of is it won\u2019t work, though.<\/p>\n
The climate mitigation plans that require endless growth to implement are\u00a0ill-conceived. The ones that require ever more ambitious micro-management of complex natural systems we don\u2019t understand are illconceived too.<\/p>\n
We need to begin categorizing things that way.\u00a0\u00a0 As far as the stimulus plan, it\u2019s mainly to prevent widespread unemployment and the collapse of flagship economic and cultural institutions.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0I think that\u2019s a fine purpose. \u00a0\u00a0Returning to endless vigorous growth also got hooked into it, though.<\/p>\n
It would work a lot better to see it as a preservation\/sustainability plan rather than for stimulating another great wave of creative destruction.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s also mysteriously not providing for any way to reduce the fictitious debt levels.<\/p>\n
The hope is to speed up the economy so it makes enough real income in the future to pay off the artificial bubble earnings of the past 30 years. \u00a0That’s what the economy already wasn\u2019t able to make good on with real earnings in the first place.<\/p>\n
Natural systems that exhibit risk avoidance seem to do it by sensing these decelerations as signals of things to come, points of “change ahead”. \u00a0 Read as hesitations in responsiveness, we all notice them as key turning points in the development of personal and business relationships.<\/p>\n
I think it\u2019s potentially a way to \u2018feel\u2019 the information readily available, far ahead of other methods.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0By watching the derivative rates of change for a broad spectrum of resource uses we might have read the approach of natural economic limits from their decelerations most of a century ago, it seems to me.<\/p>\n
If instead of having our design principle being maximum accelerating expansion it had switched to avoiding conflict, conceptually at least, we might be at today\u2019s level of comfort with 1\/10 th the burden on the earth and not in any big trouble at all\u2026<\/p>\n
Phil \u00b8\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8.\u00b7\u00b4 \u00af `\u00b7.\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8\u00b8<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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CCGroup post 2\/12\/09 responding to Alex: Phil, I liked your coded message. You mean a threshold like \u2018peak oil\u2019? Or the peak carrying capacity of the earth in terms of population? The question is, how do you propose to reduce demand? Right now, governments are doing their damnedest to stimulate demand to save the global … Continue reading Getting peeks at the the coming peaks<\/span>
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