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KICKING THE CAN ON SPACESHIP EARTH
"Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist."--Kenneth Boulding
WB7: Someone recommended that I grab a book entitled: "The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society" by Kenneth Boulding, who has been described as an economist, peace activist, poet, religious mystic and cofounder of General Systems Theory, among other things. The book attempts to explain subjective experience, knowledge and human behavior as a series of evolving images. This sounds very interesting and I can't wait to get my hands on the book.
However, in researching Mr Boulding's works, I came across the following gem. It is a paper that he delivered at an enviromental conference almost 50 years ago.
Most of what is currently written and said about the ongoing "global crisis" is framed in terms of finance. There are some scattered references to things like "capitalism hitting a wall" or "the end of capitalism" or "what Marx got right." But there is no serious talk of paradigm shift. You see today's letter from Bill Gross referring to another catchy phrase, the "death of abundance." The end of abundance, austerity and the necessity of sustainable living are all catchy phrases, but no one at the top seems willing to bite the bullet. Why should they. They have everything to lose. So it is up to the man on the street to absorb all the pain and suffering that accompanies radical economic contraction...without any plausible solution on the horizon.
Those who frame thiese issues as a capitalist dilemna often do so at the risk of being labelled socialists, communists and /or anarchists. So don't frame it as a capitalist dilemna.
Just remember, if we are unwilling to ask uncomfortable questions, we are unlikely to find realistic solutions. The idea of sustainable existence is constantly framed as radical by those who have no other agenda than to protect the status quo.
Kenneth Boulding's metaphoric reference to the wide open "cowboy economy" versus the resource constrained "space ship" economy of the future, is as relevant as ever. You can see that he became fed up with the consumption/growth myopia of economists, long before it became stylish to mock nobel laureates. He does not offer any immedate solutions except to warn that we ignore the concerns of the future at our own peril. His ideas about how and why we humans discount the well being of future generations are also interesting.
In short this is a compact work that provides a great deal of food for thought at a time when we are constantly being reminded that hopium induced consumption and growth are the panacea of all our problems; when deep in our gut we all know surely this cannot be the case. Just as our feckless leaders should know deep in their guts that kicking cans is not the long term solution to our debt fueled hangovers and resource hyperobesity.
As we all scramble to preserve our hard earned nest eggs and the banksters and Point One Percenters scramble to grab the last free crumbs laying on the table, our governments slowly but surely prepare for the civil unrest and chaos that follows from their endemic shortsightedness.
Enjoy reading...
WB7
THE ECONOMICS OF THE COMING SPACESHIP EARTH
By Kenneth E. Boulding, 1966 (First presented at the Sixth Resources For the Future Forum on Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, Washington DC (March 8, 1966))
We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier. That is, there was always some place else to go when things got too difficult, either by reason of the deterioration of the natural environment or a deterioration of the social structure in places where people happened to live. The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we find it hard to get rid of.
Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity. A few unusual spirits among the ancient Greeks perceived that the earth was a sphere. It was only with the circumnavigations and the geographical explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, that the fact that the earth was a sphere became at all widely known and accepted. Even in the thirteenth century, the commonest map was Mercator's projection, which visualizes the earth as an illimitable cylinder, essentially a plane wrapped around the globe, and it was not until the Second World War and the development of the air age that the global nature of tile planet really entered the popular imagination. Even now we are very far from having made the moral, political, and psychological adjustments which are implied in this transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.
Economists in particular, for the most part, have failed to come to grips with the ultimate consequences of the transition from the open to the closed earth. One hesitates to use the terms "open" and "closed" in this connection, as they have been used with so many different shades of meaning. Nevertheless, it is hard to find equivalents. The open system, indeed, has some similarities to the open system of von Bertalanffy, 1 in that it implies that some kind of a structure is maintained in the midst of a throughput from inputs to outputs. In a closed system, the outputs of all parts of the system are linked to the inputs of other parts. There are no inputs from outside and no outputs to the outside; indeed, there is no outside at all. Closed systems, in fact, are very rare in human experience, in fact almost by definition unknowable, for if there are genuinely closed systems around us, we have no way of getting information into them or out of them; and hence if they are really closed, we would be quite unaware of their existence. We can only find out about a closed system if we participate in it. Some isolated primitive societies may have approximated to this, but even these had to take inputs from the environment and give outputs to it. All living organisms, including man himself, are open systems. They have to receive inputs in the shape of air, food, water, and give off outputs in the form of effluvia and excrement. Deprivation of input of air, even for a few minutes, is fatal. Deprivation of the ability to obtain any input or to dispose of any output is fatal in a relatively short time. All human societies have likewise been open systems. They receive inputs from the earth, the atmosphere, and the waters, and they give outputs into these reservoirs; they also produce inputs internally in the shape of babies and outputs in the shape of corpses. Given a capacity to draw upon inputs and to get rid of outputs, an open system of this kind can persist indefinitely.
There are some systems -- such as the biological phenotype, for instance the human body-- which cannot maintain themselves indefinitely by inputs and outputs because of the phenomenon of aging. This process is very little understood. It occurs, evidently, because there are some outputs which cannot be replaced by any known input. There is not the same necessity for aging in organizations and in societies, although an analogous phenomenon may take place. The structure and composition of all organization or society, however, can be maintained by inputs of fresh personnel from birth and education as the existing personnel ages and eventually dies. Here we have an interesting example of a system which seems to maintain itself by the self-generation of inputs, and in this sense is moving towards closure. The input of people (that is, babies) is also all output of people (that is, parents).
Systems may be open or closed in respect to a number of classes of inputs and outputs. Three important classes are matter, energy, and information. The present world economy is open in regard to all three. We can think of the world economy or "econosphere" as a subset of the "world set," which is the set of all objects of possible discourse in the world. We then think of the state of the econosphere at any one moment as being the total capital stock, that is, the set of all objects, people, organizations, and so on, which are interesting from the point of view of the system of exchange. This total stock of capital is clearly an open system in the sense that it has inputs and outputs, inputs being production which adds to the capital stock, outputs being consumption which subtracts from it.
From a material point of view, we see objects passing from the noneconomic into the economic set in the process of production, and we similarly see products passing out of the economic set as their value becomes zero. Thus we see the econosphere as a material process involving the discovery and mining of fossil fuels, ores, etc., and at the other end a process by which the effluents of the system are passed out into noneconomic reservoirs -- for instance, the atmosphere and the oceans -- which are not appropriated and do not enter into the exchange system.
From the point of view of the energy system, the econosphere involves inputs of available energy in the form, say, of water power, fossil fuels, or sunlight, which are necessary in order to create the material throughput and to move matter from the noneconomic set into the economic set or even out of it again; and energy itself is given off by the system in a less available form, mostly in the form of heat. These inputs of available energy must come either from the sun (the energy supplied by other stars being assumed to be negligible) or it may come from the earth itself, either through its internal heat or through its energy of rotation or other motions, which generate, for instance, the energy of the tides. Agriculture, a few solar machines, and water power use the current available energy income. In advanced societies this is supplemented very extensively by the use of fossil fuels, which represent as it were a capital stock of stored-up sunshine. Because of this capital stock of energy, we have been able to maintain an energy input into the system, particularly over the last two centuries, much larger than we would have been able to do with existing techniques if we had had to rely on the current input of available energy from the sun or the earth itself. This supplementary input, however, is by its very nature exhaustible.
The inputs and outputs of information are more subtle and harder to trace, but also represent an open system, related to, but not wholly dependent on, the transformations of matter and energy. By far the larger amount of information and knowledge is self-generated by the human society, though a certain amount of information comes into the sociosphere in the form of light from the universe outside. The information that comes from the universe has certainly affected man's image of himself and of his environment, as we can easily visualize if we suppose that we lived on a planet with a total cloud-cover that kept out all information from the exterior universe. It is only in very recent times, of course, that the information coming in from the universe has been captured and coded into the form of a complex image of what the universe is like outside the earth; but even in primitive times, man's perception of the heavenly bodies has always profoundly affected his image of earth and of himself. It is the information generated within the planet, however, and particularly that generated by man himself, which forms by far the larger part of the information system. We can think of the stock of knowledge, or as Teilhard de Chardin called it, the "noosphere," and consider this as an open system, losing knowledge through aging and death and gaining it through birth and education and the ordinary experience of life.
From the human point of view, knowledge or information is by far the most important of the three systems. Matter only acquires significance and only enters the sociosphere or the econosphere insofar as it becomes an object of human knowledge. We can think of capital, indeed, as frozen knowledge or knowledge imposed on the material world in the form of improbable arrangements. A machine, for instance, originated in the mind of man, and both its construction and its use involve information processes imposed on the material world by man himself. The cumulation of knowledge, that is, the excess of its production over its consumption, is the key to human development of all kinds, especially to economic development. We can see this pre-eminence of knowledge very clearly in the experiences of countries where the material capital has been destroyed by a war, as in Japan and Germany. The knowledge of the people was not destroyed, and it did not take long, therefore, certainly not more than ten years, for most of the material capital to be reestablished again. In a country such as Indonesia, however, where the knowledge did not exist, the material capital did not come into being either. By "knowledge" here I mean, of course, the whole cognitive structure, which includes valuations and motivations as well as images of the factual world.
The concept of entropy, used in a somewhat loose sense, can be applied to all three of these open systems. In the case of material systems, we can distinguish between entropic processes, which take concentrated materials and diffuse them through the oceans or over the earth's surface or into the atmosphere, and anti-entropic processes, which take diffuse materials and concentrate them. Material entropy can be taken as a measure of the uniformity of the distribution of elements and, more uncertainly, compounds and other structures on the earth's surface. There is, fortunately, no law of increasing material entropy, as there is in the corresponding case of energy, as it is quite possible to concentrate diffused materials if energy inputs are allowed. Thus the processes for fixation of nitrogen from the air, processes for the extraction of magnesium or other elements from the sea, and processes for the desalinization of sea water are anti-entropic ill the material sense, though the reduction of material entropy has to be paid for by inputs of energy and also inputs of information, or at least a stock of information in the system.
In regard to matter, therefore, a closed system is conceivable, that is, a system in which there is neither increase nor decrease in material entropy. In such a system all outputs from consumption would constantly be recycled to become inputs for production, as for instance, nitrogen in the nitrogen cycle of the natural ecosystem.
In regard to the energy system there is, unfortunately, no escape from the grim Second Law of Thermodynamics; and if there were no energy inputs into the earth, any evolutionary or developmental process would be impossible. The large energy inputs which we have obtained from fossil fuels are strictly temporary. Even the most optimistic predictions would expect the easily available supply of fossil fuels to be exhausted in a mere matter of centuries at present rates of use. If the rest of the world were to rise to American standards of power consumption, and still more if world population continues to increase, the exhaustion of fossil fuels would be even more rapid. The development of nuclear energy has improved this picture, but has not fundamentally altered it, at least in present technologies, for fissionable material is still relatively scarce. If we should achieve the economic use of energy through fusion, of course, a much larger source of energy materials would be available, which would expand the time horizons of supplementary energy input into an open social system by perhaps tens to hundreds of thousands of years. Failing this, however, the time is not very far distant, historically speaking, when man will once more have to retreat to his current energy input from tile sun, even though this could be used much more effectively than in the past with increased knowledge. Up to now, certainly, we have not got very far with the technology of using current solar energy, but the possibility of substantial improvements in the future is certainly high. It may be, indeed, that the biological revolution which is just beginning will produce a solution to this problem, as we develop artificial organisms which are capable of much more efficient transformation of solar energy into easily available forms than any that we now have. As Richard Meier has suggested, we may run our machines in the future with methane-producing algae. 2
The question of whether there is anything corresponding to entropy in the information system is a puzzling one, though of great interest. There are certainly many examples of social systems and cultures which have lost knowledge, especially in transition from one generation to the next, and in which the culture has therefore degenerated. One only has to look at the folk culture of Appalachian migrants to American cities to see a culture which started out as a fairly rich European folk culture in Elizabethan times and which seems to have lost both skills, adaptability, folk tales, songs, and almost everything that goes up to make richness and complexity in a culture, in the course of about ten generations. The American Indians on reservations provide another example of such degradation of the information and knowledge system. On the other hand, over a great part of human history, the growth of knowledge in the earth as a whole seems to have been almost continuous, even though there have been times of relatively slow growth and times of rapid growth. As it is knowledge of certain kinds that produces the growth of knowledge in general, we have here a very subtle and complicated system, and it is hard to put one's finger on the particular elements in a culture which make knowledge grow more or less rapidly, or even which make it decline. One of the great puzzles in this connection, for instance, is why the take-off into science, which represents an "acceleration," or an increase in the rate of growth of knowledge in European society in the sixteenth century, did not take place in China, which at that time (about 1600) was unquestionably ahead of Europe, and one would think even more ready for the breakthrough. This is perhaps the most crucial question in the theory of social development, yet we must confess that it is very little understood. Perhaps the most significant factor in this connection is the existence of "slack" in the culture, which permits a divergence from established patterns and activity which is not merely devoted to reproducing the existing society but is devoted to changing it. China was perhaps too well-organized and had too little slack in its society to produce the kind of acceleration which we find in the somewhat poorer and less well-organized but more diverse societies of Europe.
The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past. For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the "cowboy economy," the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. Tile closed economy of the future might similarly be called the "spaceman" economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy. The difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the success of the economy is measured by the amount of tile throughput from the "factors of production," a part of which, at any rate, is extracted from the reservoirs of raw materials and noneconomic objects, and another part of which is output into the reservoirs of pollution. If there are infinite reservoirs from which material can be obtained and into which effluvia can be deposited, then the throughput is at least a plausible measure of the success of the economy. The gross national product is a rough measure of this total throughput. It should be possible, however, to distinguish that part of the GNP which is derived from exhaustible and that which is derived from reproducible resources, as well as that part of consumption which represents effluvia and that which represents input into the productive system again. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever attempted to break down the GNP in this way, although it would be an interesting and extremely important exercise, which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper.
By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with tile income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.
There are actually some very tricky and unsolved problems involved in the questions as to whether human welfare or well-being is to be regarded as a stock or a flow. Something of both these elements seems actually to be involved in it, and as far as I know there have been practically no studies directed towards identifying these two dimensions of human satisfaction. Is it, for instance, eating that is a good thing, or is it being well fed? Does economic welfare involve having nice clothes, fine houses, good equipment, and so on, or is it to be measured by the depreciation and the wearing out of these things? I am inclined myself to regard the stock concept as most fundamental, that is, to think of being well fed as more important than eating, and to think even of so-called services as essentially involving the restoration of a depleting psychic capital. Thus I have argued that we go to a concert in order to restore a psychic condition which might be called "just having gone to a concert," which, once established, tends to depreciate. When it depreciates beyond a certain point, we go to another concert in order to restore it. If it depreciates rapidly, we go to a lot of concerts; if it depreciates slowly, we go to few. On this view, similarly, we eat primarily to restore bodily homeostasis, that is, to maintain a condition of being well fed, and so on. On this view, there is nothing desirable in consumption at all. The less consumption we can maintain a given state with, the better off we are. If we had clothes that did not wear out, houses that did not depreciate, and even if we could maintain our bodily condition without eating, we would clearly be much better off.
It is this last consideration, perhaps, which makes one pause. Would we, for instance, really want an operation that at would enable us to restore all our bodily tissues by intravenous feeding while we slept? Is there not, that is to say, a certain virtue in throughput itself, in activity itself, in production and consumption itself, in raising food and in eating it? It would certainly be rash to exclude this possibility. Further interesting problems are raised by the demand for variety. We certainly do not want a constant state to be maintained; we want fluctuations in the state. Otherwise there would be no demand for variety in food, for variety in scene, as in travel, for variety in social contact, and so on. The demand for variety can, of course, be costly, and sometimes it seems to be too costly to be tolerated or at least legitimated, as in tile case of marital partners, where the maintenance of a homeostatic state in the family is usually regarded as much more desirable than the variety and excessive throughput of the libertine. There are problems here which the economics profession has neglected with astonishing singlemindedness. My own attempts to call attention to some of them, for instance, in two articles, 3 as far as I call judge, produced no response whatever; and economists continue to think and act as if production, consumption, throughput, and the GNP were the sufficient and adequate measure of economic success.
It may be said, of course, why worry about all this when the spaceman economy is still a good way off (at least beyond the lifetimes of any now living), so let us eat, drink, spend, extract and pollute, and be as merry as we can, and let posterity worry about the spaceship earth. It is always a little hard to find a convincing answer to the man who says, "What has posterity ever done for me?" and the conservationist has always had to fall back on rather vague ethical principles postulating identity of the individual with some human community or society which extends not only back into the past but forward into the future. Unless the individual identifies with some community of this kind, conservation is obviously "irrational." Why should we not maximize the welfare of this generation at the cost of posterity? "Apres nous, le deluge" has been the motto of not insignificant numbers of human societies. The only answer to this, as far as I can see, is to point out that the welfare of the individual depends on the extent to which he can identify himself with others, and that the most satisfactory individual identity is that which identifies not only with a community in space but also with a community extending over time from the past into the future. If this kind of identity is recognized as desirable, then posterity has a voice, even if it does not have a vote; and in a sense, if its voice can influence votes, it has votes too. This whole problem is linked tip with the much larger one of the determinants of the morale, legitimacy, and "nerve" of a society, and there is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart. 4
Even if we concede that posterity is relevant to our present problems, we still face the question of time-discounting and the closely related question of uncertainty-discounting. It is a well-known phenomenon that individuals discount the future, even in their own lives. The very existence of a positive rate of interest may be taken as at least strong supporting evidence of this hypothesis. If we discount our own future, it is certainly not unreasonable to discount posterity's future even more, even if we do give posterity a vote. If we discount this at 5 per cent per annum, posterity's vote or dollar halves every fourteen years as we look into the future, and after even a mere hundred years it is pretty small -- only about 1 1/2 cents on the dollar. If we add another 5 per cent for uncertainty, even the vote of our grandchildren reduces almost to insignificance. We can argue, of course, that the ethical thing to do is not to discount the future at all, that time-discounting is mainly the result of myopia and perspective, and hence is an illusion which the moral man should not tolerate. It is a very popular illusion, however, and one that must certainly be taken into consideration in the formulation of policies. It explains, perhaps, why conservationist policies almost have to be sold under some other excuse which seems more urgent, and why, indeed, necessities which are visualized as urgent, such as defense, always seem to hold priority over those which involve the future.
All these considerations add some credence to the point of view which says that we should not worry about the spaceman economy at all, and that we should just go on increasing the GNP and indeed the gross world product, or GWP, in the expectation that the problems of the future can be left to the future, that when scarcities arise, whether this is of raw materials or of pollutable reservoirs, the needs of the then present will determine the solutions of the then present, and there is no use giving ourselves ulcers by worrying about problems that we really do not have to solve. There is even high ethical authority for this point of view in the New Testament, which advocates that we should take no thought for tomorrow and let the dead bury their dead. There has always been something rather refreshing in the view that we should live like the birds, and perhaps posterity is for the birds in more senses than one; so perhaps we should all call it a day and go out and pollute something cheerfully. As an old taker of thought for the morrow, however, I cannot quite accept this solution; and I would argue, furthermore, that tomorrow is not only very close, but in many respects it is already here. The shadow of the future spaceship, indeed, is already falling over our spendthrift merriment. Oddly enough, it seems to be in pollution rather than in exhaustion that the problem is first becoming salient. Los Angeles has run out of air, Lake Erie has become a cesspool, the oceans are getting full of lead and DDT, and the atmosphere may become man's major problem in another generation, at the rate at which we are filling
it up with gunk. It is, of course, true that at least on it microscale, things have been worse at times in the past. The cities of today, with all their foul air and polluted waterways, are probably not as bad as the filthy cities of the petrochemical age. Nevertheless, that fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society; and one certainly cannot view with equanimity the present rate of pollution of any of the natural reservoirs, whether the atmosphere, the lakes, or even the oceans.
I would argue strongly also that our obsession with production and consumption to the exclusion of the "state" aspects of human welfare distorts the process of technological change in a most undesirable way. We are all familiar, of course, with the wastes involved in planned obsolescence, in competitive advertising, and in poor quality of consumer goods. These problems may not be so important as tile "view with alarm," school indicates, and indeed the evidence at many points is conflicting. New materials especially seem to edge towards the side of improved durability, such as, for instance, neolite soles for footwear, nylon socks, wash and wear shirts, and so on. The case of household equipment and automobiles is a little less clear. Housing and building construction generally almost certainly has declined in durability since the Middle Ages, but this decline also reflects a change in tastes towards flexibility and fashion and a need for novelty, so that it is not easy to assess. What is clear is that no serious attempt has been made to assess the impact over the whole of economic life of changes in durability, that is, in the ratio of capital ill the widest possible sense to income. I suspect that we have underestimated, even in our spendthrift society, the gains from increased durability, and that this might very well be one of the places where the price system needs correction through government-sponsored research and development. Thc problems which the spaceship earth is going to present, therefore, are not all in the future by any means, and a strong case can be made for paying much more attention to them in the present than we now do.
It may be complained that the considerations I have been putting forth relate only to the very long run, and they do not much concern our immediate problems. There may be some justice in this criticism, and my main excuse is that other writers have dealt adequately with the more immediate problems of deterioration in the quality of the environment. It is true, for instance, that many of the immediate problems of pollution of the atmosphere or of bodies of water arise because of the failure of the price system, and many of them could be solved by corrective taxation. If people had to pay the losses due to the nuisances which they create, a good deal more resources would go into the prevention of nuisances. These arguments involving external economies and diseconomics arc familiar to economists, and there is no need to recapitulate them. The law of torts is quite inadequate to provide for the correction of the price system which is required, simply because where damages are widespread and their incidence on any particular person is small, the ordinary remedies of the civil law are quite inadequate and inappropriate. There needs, therefore, to be special legislation to cover those cases, and though such legislation seems hard to get in practice, mainly because of the widespread and small personal incidence of the injuries, the technical problems involved are not insuperable. If we were to adopt in principle a law for tax penalties for social damages, with an apparatus for making assessments under it, a very large proportion of current pollution and deterioration of the environment would be prevented. There are tricky problems of equity involved, particularly where old established nuisances create a kind of "right by purchase" to perpetuate themselves, but these are problems again which a few rather arbitrary decisions can bring to some kind of solution.
The problems which I have been raising in this paper are of larger scale and perhaps much harder to solve than the more practical and immediate problems of the above paragraph. Our success in dealing with the larger problems, however, is not unrelated to the development of skill in the solution of the more immediate and perhaps less difficult problems. One can hope, therefore, that as a succession of mounting crises, especially in pollution, arouse public opinion and mobilize support for the solution of the immediate problems, a learning process will be set in motion which will eventually lead to an appreciation of and perhaps solutions for the larger ones. My neglect of the immediate problems, therefore, is in no way intended to deny their importance, for unless we at least make a beginning on a process for solving the immediate problems we will not have much chance of solving the larger ones. On the other hand, it may also be true that a long-run vision, as it were, of the deep crisis which faces mankind may predispose people to taking more interest in the immediate problems and to devote more effort for their solution. This may sound like a rather modest optimism, but perhaps a modest optimism is better than no optimism at all.
Notes:
1 Ludwig von Berlalanffy, Problems of Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1952).
2 Richard L. Meier, Science and Economic Development (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956).
3 K. E. Boulding, "The Consumption Concept in Economic Theory," American Economic Review, 35:2 (May 1945), pp. 1-14; and "Income or Welfare?," Review o/Economic Studies, 17 (1949-50), pp. 77-86.
4 Fred L. Polak, The Image o/ the Future. Vols. I and II, translated by Elise Boulding (New York: Sythoff, Leyden and Oceana, 1961 ).
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Great post, Banzai. Lots of material here for the ZH crowd to gnaw on, although perhaps a little too technical for most to completely understand (you need some physics/engineering education to grasp 'closed systems,' and that led some astray). But his bottom line, time to give up the cowboy mentality and start at least considering the spaceship earth mentality, was past due when this was first published. The earth's resources are finite, and while they always appeared sufficiently large, at least to the cowboys, the current pace of population growth and energy consumption are starting to show where the cracks will appear. Take for example the supply of fresh water: clearly regenerative, a true closed system (no water leaving or entering the earth), but the supply of usable fresh water is already at its limits. And with 60 to 75% of fresh water being needed for agriculture, increasing population demands increasing agriculture, hence more demand for fresh water than supply available. In economics, this would be resolved by price, ie, those with economic power (currently those who print money) would outbid (read deprive) those with less economic power. But in the consumer world, increasing population will mean increasing starvation. So if man is a self-organizing system, it is time for him to recognize limits to growth and begin to rearrange society such that expanding consumerism is not the only goal.
Fishhawk
Consider the "Cradle" mentality, i.e., the Earth is only Mankind's cradle, that we must eventually grow out of -- the Universe is a big place, with plenty of room -- expand yer thinking!
The one thing made absolutely clear on ZH, is that the markets are either broken or more likely rigged. Therefore, the mechanisms for resource allocation are flawed, depending on whose side you are on.
The basic principle of "small is beautiful" is something that definitely does not fit within the narrative framework of those operating the levers of power.
The tragedy of the commons...
ON A LONG ENOUGH TIMELINE... You wouldn't be reading this --unless-- you already knew it's a zero-sum game! The rest (including tech -- hello -- OIL?!) is mostly hopium. Sustainability or death. Maybe not just yet and maybe not for you. But coming soon to a future increasingly NEAR you...
Sorry Folks"We are the Extenction Event"It's Over
Here You Go.... http://laughingwheels.blogspot.com/2011/12/bumber-sticker-du-jour.html
WB7:
While you are reading up you might want to check out "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" by R. Buckminister Fuller; or "Critical Path", same author. Bucky was an optimist, but he saw many stupid decisions being made.
Save the Python. Make Newt spit it up!
I have read excerpts of it. Another big thinker. We don't seem to have have many around anymore.
All open systems affect most everything. All closed systems affect only that within it's system unless integrated into an open system. There... fixed it for ya, in less than a zillion words....
.
i'm going to go out on one of my favorite limbs here.
mankind is just life, mankind is just the universe itself
transcribed through matter, elements and biology, to
mirror in his energy and organs the physical and energetic
relationships of our place and perspective in the universe.
the key difference between man and the rest of the animal
kingdom, the thing that makes man so special and dangerous
to his ecology, environment and himself is the fact that
in his/her birthing he arrives in the world prematurely.
unlike all other creatures of scale he is entirely incompetent
for years after his arrival in the is world and from that
womb. i believe this is the most profound and essential
cause and determining fact of man that dictates the insanity
we experience in this life verses the relative calm and
edenic experience of the rest of life, the "unconscious
species". and this implies to me the basis for understanding
just about everything under the sun.
because we are born from the womb into this world of
potential terminal assaults and are so helpless our survival
is predicated on years of concerted nurturing and significant
environmental modification, this requires tremendous
creativity and dedication from our ' parents and partners'. either that or the
species is terminated. from this simple demand of extended
nurturing and environmental modification and alteration and concomitant
capacity to meet the challenges and survive, all the historic
developments structural and narrative and linguistic and
mythological and societal refer and are derived.
man must create an external womb for his offspring and then that
offspring must be born again from that second womb. that family.
the genders have different creative consciousness, yet they overlap
and are exchangeable and are latent and then dominant depending on
the demands of the day. it is a sort of bicameral sequential unfolding
emergent consciousness that collapses on us. insight?
nature provides the initial source first. female.
the male is charged with being out of time to create
and sustain a 'synthetic' environment ( virtual womb )
while the offspring slowly matures to "independence" in relative safety.
as civilization progresses more and more people derive
comfort from the infrastructure of the created womb, in
a sense no one is independent in a mature culture, we all
become the unborn, the sheltered by the culture, permanent
children of technology? but we have the capacity to comprehend
the dynamics of our circumstance to some extent. the capacity to be born
again into the universe we integrate, either that or we perish.
from pjb at verbewarp
http://verbewarp.blogspot.com/2012/02/leadership-order-of-white-feather....
.
http://news.yahoo.com/snowy-owls-soar-south-arctic-rare-mass-migration-1...?
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
And that changes everything.
T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"
2nd law of Thermodynamics is a lie/incorrect.
Fusion is a real wealth creating project that can be done.
So many smart people STILL DON'T understand that while mankind has made great progress over the last few thousand years, it's been wholly neutered by the format with which we have done it. Aristotle was full of shit. But all of western civilization bases itself on exactly what Aristotle was wrong about. It's truly amazing how much our society is based off of complete bullshit, legitimized by Aristotle's bullshit...that became widely accepted, because the oligarchy needed the leeway to fuck with us to maintain control. That even people who are against the oligarchy, still debate things using the oligarchic format. Meaning, heads they win, tails you lose. BECAUSE YOU CHOSE TO BASE THE OUTCOME ON THEIR COIN (the coin of Aristotle's bullshit).
Evolution as Anti-Entropy: Destroying the Second Law
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/18937
Planetary Defense: An Extraterrestrial Imperative (note: no this does not mean aliens)http://www.larouchepac.com/planetarydefense
Dialogue With LaRouche – The Science Behind Glass Steagall
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/17609
Here's a nice quote from the above article
"And we have to get rid of this — let's take the other side of the thing; where's the other side of the thing, from Aristotle and so forth? People taught the doctrine, of the anti-Promethean doctrine, the doctrine that man is inherently limited, and that man must not progress. The doctrine was, some people are the gods, they're the rich people, they're the people who control society, and their problem is they've got to control this society. They need the work of the poor slaves, the human slaves and serfs. But they don't want the human slaves and serfs to get too smart! Because, if they get too smart, they won't put up with the oligarchs! And therefore, the oligarchs have the policy of the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics: "Don't let these human creatures get smart, or they won't tolerate us
And this is what's called -- we live under a culture, a European culture for example, and other parts of the planet, which is what? It's the oligarchical principle! That a small oligarchy must manage the other human beings of the planet, as if they were animals, and prevent these animals from becoming too numerous. Because if they become too numerous, they're going to need to develop; and if they develop, then they're not going to be stupid any more. So you won't be able to control them. And that's why you have the World Wildlife Fund of this fascist, Prince Bernhard, who was a Nazi, who married a Dutch princess, and no improvement to anything. And then you have the crown prince [Prince Consort] in England, the World Wildlife Fund. What's the policy of the World Wildlife Fund? Genocide! What's the policy of the British Empire? Genocide! What's the policy of the President of the United States, today? Genocide! Just like Hitler, same T-4 program, by this current President, pushed in, and brought in a British racist to help, Berwick, to help implement it."
Onward to Mars: The Triumph of the Weak Forces
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/14423
Here is another quote, but the article should be read in full
"Wolfgang Köhler, one of the founders of gestalt psychology, recognized that the very concept of discrete particles of matter was nothing more than an artifact of a naïve interpretation of vision. As a result, the precepts of both biology and physics were limited by their inability to deal with the ontological reality of functional, self-organizing wholes—the gestalt phenomena of human mental activity.
In biology the controversy has centered around the problem whether life processes can be explained physio-chemically or whether “vital” forces must be postulated. Indeed, the properties of life processes with which biology is concerned are not unlike the psychical phenomena responsible for the Gestalt problem in psychology. This does not mean, however, that the vitalists' doctrine in biology recommends itself as particularly fruitful, for their answer precludes the possibility of success in a search for physical Gestalten. The biologists have of course made some attempts at discovering analogies in physics, but thus far little more than vague comparisons with crystal formations have been achieved....The closest approach between general biology and psychology occurs in the theory of nervous functions, particularly in the doctrine of the physical basis of consciousness. Here we have an immediate correspondence between mental and physical processes and the demand seems inescapable that at this point organic functions be thought of as participating in and exhibiting essentially Gestalt characteristics.11
Because the thought and language of physics, consequently carried over into biology, had been based on mechanistic assumptions, a new conceptual foundation for these sciences would have to be built up from the language governing cognitive processes—an approach consistent with Vernadsky's discovery of the subsuming characteristic of the noosphere over both the biotic and abiotic.
According to the machine conceptions, order in nature can only be imposed by certain fixed constraints, a necessary corollary to the idea at the root of the 2nd law of statistical thermodynamics: that natural process inherently tend toward disorder. It is true that within any given boundary conditions for a given system, there is a definite tendency toward an equilibrium state describable by the 2nd law. However, the principle of direction in that system can also be attributed to strictly physical (what Max Planck called “dynamical”), rather than statistical, principles, such as the system's tendency to reduce its total potential.12 The machine conception fails even as a beginning point in reasoning. Within certain boundary conditions, which themselves cannot be defined by the 2nd law, even inorganic systems have the capacity for regulation purely through the interaction of the physical forces inherent in the system.
The array of these physical forces active in biological processes are not a subset of, but rather subsume those found in inorganic systems, and appear to include not only chemical and electrodynamic phenomena, but everything from laser-like biophoton emissions, to nuclear transmutation and superconductivity, processes whose abiotic expression may represent merely “limiting conditions” of their more universal manifestation in life. These processes act to reshape the topological boundary conditions represented by any given physical state of an organism, as in the case of the electric fields governing limb regeneration.
In a machine, the distinction between process and structure is unambiguous; for example, hot gases are conducted through the rigid chamber walls of a car engine. In an organism, the energetic flow required for metabolism literally builds, and constantly maintains, the structure of the organism. Moreover, this energetic flow is part of a continuous process extending from terrestrial, to solar, to cosmic space, begging the question: are there any strictly inorganic systems for which the 2nd law has universal significance?"
THE CULT OF THE OLIGARCHY: The Gore of Babylonhttp://www.larouchepac.com/node/719
Here's another quote, hell it's 1/3 of the article, and once again I suggest reading the entire thing. It's really a great article that touches so much of what goes on underneath the broken system we run. Actually I'll do two.
"To this end, it is absolutely essential that the so-called "free trade" system be uprooted, and sent to repose for future contemplation in a museum for dangerously insane ideas. The American System, as understood by Alexander Hamilton et al., a system premised on the notions of physical, rather than monetary economy, defines the terms of agreement among sovereign states, on which a new relatively fixed-exchange-rate system is to be established with an estimate fifty-year forward span of treaty agreements on credit and trade, for promotion of long-term capital formation and technological progress, among these sovereign states.
I explain.Science & Economic Freedom
As I have already stressed, the distinctive characteristic of the human individual which separates man from beast, is typified by that scientific method which is to be associated with the ancient Pythagoreans and Plato, and with the successors of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa in science and statecraft, such as Kepler, Leibniz, Riemann, and Vernadsky.
To understand economics, as very few living economists today—even otherwise intelligent and well-meaning ones, do, we must clear our heads on account of two crucial issues of scientific method on which the survival of republic for the immediate future now depends. In taking into account that life is a process which is not derivable from the customarily chosen mathematics of non-living processes, and, also recognizing that the cognitive processes which distinguish human individuals from animals are not derivable from biology as such. Such are the implications of Vernadsky's definitions of living processes (the Biosphere ) and human cognitive processes (the Noösphere ). In the instance of the Noösphere, the physical-experimental basis for defining this distinction of human mental processes is located, in a modern science context, in the notion of the ontologically infinitesimal , as this notion was typified by Kepler's and Leibniz's definition of the ontological principle of the ontologically infinitesimal calculus."
2nd quote
"H.G. Wells' Things to Come should be audited as both an echo of Wells' earlier The Open Conspiracy , and as the same intention expressed by Bertrand Russell's 1946 public declaration of the intent to launch nuclear war to eradicate the nation-state, and replace it, promptly, with the same imperialism of "world government" expressed by Al Gore's fraudulent "global warming" of today.
The meaningful use of "humanism" is the treatment of the effects of the cognitive features of human behavior, as typified by the uniquely human discovery of universal physical principles, as separating mankind from the beasts, and beastly behavior generally. In Christian and Mosaic theology, the proper use of the term humanism references Genesis 1:26-31.
Friedrich Nietzsche (English edition), The Birth of Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
The designation of a social class of persons as set apart from, and beneath the quality of humanism, is the intrinsic principle of evil common to Lycurgan Sparta, the Roman and Byzantine empires, the medieval Venetian-Norman ultramontane system, and the British Empire established by the Anglo-Dutch Liberal financier-oligarchy under the leadership of Lord Shelburne and his successors.
Philo Judaeus' refutation of the Aristoteleans, on the subject of the potency of the Creator, is of manifold relevance here. In science, the experimental refutation, by Kepler, of the assumed existence of the equant , leads to the same conclusion delivered, against Aristotlean theology, by Philo. Kepler proved, by this repeatedly employed discovery of the non-existence of the equant , that, the universe (e.g., the Solar system) is a process of continuing creation from the starting-point of the Sun, and that this shows the determining function of creativity, by the Creator, in the development of the Solar system from the relative starting-point of a lonely, fast-spinning, solitary Sun. Hence, the anti-entropic universe of Kepler and Leibniz, in which the principle of creativity, as reflected by Leibniz's Keplerian principle of the ontologically efficient, infinitesimal calculus (of catenary-cued, universal physical least action), defines an anti-entropic Solar system, and, implicitly, an anti-entropic universe free of such pitiable encumbrances as the pathetic notion of a "Second Law of Thermodynamics." Substitute the pragmatic term, "relative energy-flux density" for "energy," and one is on the road to clearing away the relevant, popularized, ontological delusions of Clausius, Kelvin, Grassmann, the Machians, et al. Why should the existence of a willfully creative Creator of the universe be left to a matter of mere opinionated belief, when the evidence needed is so clearly available?
SeeEIR Special Report, September 1997, for details on the role of Gore's friends in the World Wildlife Fund in illegal trade of ivory and rhinoceros teeth, as well as involvement in provoking civil wars and intracommunal violence in southern Africa.
Gore's "CO2" hoax, echoes Henry A. Kissinger on pro-genocidal Africa economic policy. On Dec. 10, 1974, the U.S. National Security Council under Henry Kissinger completed a classified 200-page study,The study falsely claimed that population growth in the so-called Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) was a grave threat to U.S. national security. Adopted as official policy in November 1975 by President Gerald Ford, NSSM 200 outlined a covert plan to reduce population growth in those countries through birth control, and also, implicitly, war and famine.
The Romantic composer Hugo Wolf, set a portion of Goethe's fragmentary Grosskopta , a defiant declaration by Goethe's and Wolf's Prometheus, to song. Here, Wolf errs in leaning toward the Romantic side of Goethe. Aeschylus' Prometheus is defiant, but never a Jacobin! This was the pivotal issue which set the founders of Germanic Eighteenth-Century Classicism, the promoters of Leibniz and Johann Sebastian Bach, such as Abraham Kästner, Gotthold Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, and Friedrich Schiller from the post-Vienna Congress poets and musicians, as Heinrich Heine's confessional treatment of the Romantic School locates the crippling cultural effects of the post-Schiller "Romantic School." The free man casts off his chains, and proclaims his freedom, as Keats and Shelley did; he does not proudly rattle them.
The Athenians' Nazi-like butchery of the people of the island of Melos, is the landmark event, the specific crime, corresponding to the case of the "Gulf of Tonkin" frauds and George W. Bush, Jr.'s lying his way into the currently still ongoing war in Southwest Asia, which led the U.S. into wars of its own relative self-destruction.
It was Cusa's development of perspectives for crossing oceans to engage parts of the human cultures beyond Europe, which explicitly inspired and guided Christopher Columbus.
The triumph of the British East India Company at the February 1763 Peace of Paris, divided the political ranks of the leading circles of the American colonies between the patriots and American accomplices of the British East India Company gathered around Judge Lowell. It was the issue of the new British imperial policy established in February 1763 which led into the American Revolution. Cf. Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America and H. Graham Lowry, How the Nation Was Won .
For this reason, the matter of physical science, as understood by Plato and Kepler, and the principle of Classical artistic composition and practice, are separated practically from so-called "popular cultures."
By 1927, Russell and H.G. Wells had patched up their earlier personal differences. Russell's role in pushing for an unprovoked nuclear assault on the Soviet Union (when it was presumed that the USSR would not be equipped with such weapons), was in keeping with Well's The Open Conspiracy and Wells' script for the utopian fantasy Things to Come .
I have never been so naive as to consider the late Allen Dulles as a true U.S. patriot, nor do I believe that President Eisenhower did in referring to the existence of what he had experienced as the insurrectionary threat to our republic from a "military-industrial complex." The virtual coup d'état which Dulles and his flunky James J. Angleton ran against President Roosevelt's policy for Italy, for example, must be taken into account, as well as President Truman's dropping the nuclear-weapons prototypes on the civilian population of an already decisively defeated Japan, and other typical developments under the influence of the Churchill-led gang to which Dulles was attached as much during the 1950s as in 1945 Italy.
I.e., Carl F. Gauss's 1799 doctoral dissertation, in which he demolished the anti-Leibniz theses on which the mathematical physics of D'Alembert, Euler, Lagrange and their continuing faction is premised, to the present day! However, it was only in his last writing on this subject that the seriously threatened Gauss dared to present the concept of the physical complex domain explicitly. The implications of Gauss's actual views are to be found expressed plainly in the work of Bernhard Riemann on the physics of anti-Euclidean geometry.
The Fascist Roots of The Behavioral Economists Surrounding Obama (including that root of Kenneth E. Boulding)
http://www.larouchepac.com/node/9907
Remember, Earth isn't the universe, which means...in reality, Earth can only be a closed system when people incorrectly decide it to be. The universe is not only much bigger than Earth, and all it entails, but also still in the process of formation, as every day in this universe, new stars ignite. The same can be said 100 years from now. Even 100 million years from now. Probably even 100 billion years from now.
Mankind is a force of anti-entrophy. The more we actually learn, the better we become at it. The better we become at it, the more powerful we as a species we truly become.
It's not a lie, but it only applies to closed systems.
The earth cannot be seen as a closed system, as it has a kind of singularity near it (called the sun).
I had no idea LaRouche is still alive. So much for the laws of thermodynamics.
Only the good die young.
When this political Nosferatu is going to die, though, remains an open question. I am guessing that he stays alive by drinking the blood of the British royal family (which also explains why they are all so pasty-white).
Did anyone get the license plate of that truck?
When are you insane LaRouchers going to realize that NOBODY takes you or your senile madman of a cult leader seriously, or is even listening to anything that you say?
First I'm giving jmc an up arrow, now I'm going to kick your ass. Good job not taking anything Mr. LaRouche has said seriously. He has only been right for forty years and tangled personally with the corrupt banking and political establishment (the books Dope Inc. and The New Dark Age Conspiracy have been proven right in spades).
My favorite moment was when the Federal judge ordered then-VP Bush 41's office safe searched. Sure enough, they found proof that Bush was controlling a mole in the LaRouche organization. The prosecutor knew about it and lied about it to the judge. After the mistrial was declared, they started a new prosecution in Alexandria's "rocket docket" court with a judge who was up to his neck in gunrunning for the CIA. Convicted by a jury of federal employees of "interfering with the duty of the IRS" they tried to kill him in prison.
Another trial was held for the Leesburg Eight that included one of the LaRouche organization's top fundraisers. The prosecution of Mike Billington exposed that he was raising money from the same people on Ollie North's fundraising list. North ran the guns for drugs operation called Iran-Contra from an office in the White House, with the guns supplied by the East German Stasi. The money North raised was handled by his bag-man Robert Owens to finance the Iran-Contra operation. Robert Owens later worked for Global Options, a private spook business in DC headed by Neil Livingston, another Iran-Contra alum. I stumbled on Global Options after 911, and lookee there, they had all of the necessary in-house capabilities to carry out the WTC attack, such as architectural engineers, demolition experts and the US embassy official who was in charge of handing out visas in Saudi Arabia.
While still in prison, Mr. LaRouche was visited by representatives of the Russian Academy of Sciences who wanted to know how he knew the Soviet Union was going to collapse. Following his early release by newly-elected President Bill Clinton, Mr. LaRouche was invited to join the Russian Academy of Sciences. In addition to training a new cadre of Russian economists, Mr. LaRouche testified to the Italian Parliament, was honored by the Chinese government for his work on the New Silk Road project, and was welcomed on a visit to Turkey with full military honors. Mr. LaRouche has had some interesting friends and collaborators such as Father Richard McSorley S.J. (one of Bill Clinton's mentors), Eugene McCarthy, and L. Fletcher Prouty.
What have you done, Akak, except anonymously sniping at a someone who is actively engaging our common enemies at his own personal peril? If anyone embodies the theme of Fight Club, it is Mr. LaRouche. He was knocked-down and got right back up to keep fighting. And he does it with some wickedly good humor too. Guess what? He doesn't give a shit about what you think.
Now go fuck yourself.
Lyndon LaRouche is an unprincipled, egomaniacal statist with megadelusions of grandeur. The fact that, unlike say Ron Paul, he has not founded a growing political movement around a consistent and logically coherent set of core principles, but a classic (and shrinking) cult of personality instead, should be enough by itself to discredit him in the eyes of any open-minded and intelligent observer. His entire, ever-shifting platform is and has always been nothing but a surreal mishmash of philosophically and logically contradictory personal opinions and starry-eyed, government-directed goals. He is just another statist in a world drowning in them already. Fuck him, and fuck you too.
PS: Given that you are obviously just another brainwashed and foaming-at-the-mouth lemminglike acolyte of LaDouche, fuck you twice over.
I'm not so down on Spaceship Earth. Sure it's not the jewel of Epcot that it once ways, but at least they've finally taken that stupid Disney wand off of it.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz,.... try www.nar2012.com .... a much more common sense approach that aims to restore (gasp) LIBERTY!!! What a novel idea.
make a saga of the debt brother
I am formulating my next sorty on him.
cool, Rock On!
Good article. Reminds me of Hugh Nibley's musings in Approaching Zion wherein he states that "work we must, but the lunch is free."
that essay needs some serious editing. reminds me of cogdis's endless run on babble.
AIPAC Tried Cajoling, Pressuring Dem Think-Tank To Stop Criticizing Israel
Why Did Mossad Chief Hold Secret Talks With Top U.S. Officials This Week?
Private security agency headed by former IDF officers ready to crush (soros funded) Occupy Miami
Jewry's Lock On America's Security
It's actually two essays in one in my opinion. He apparently loved to work on a dictaphone.
Endless babble, endless pictures, endless Zionist conspiracy links, to each his own ;-)
Physical constraints? What is that Boulding guy talking about?
The shelves at the grocery store are always full (?).
Katrina? New Orleans? What's that?
The Bernank can "Ctrl-$" to infinity!
(/sarc off)
I think he is obviously looking way over the horizon. But he was clearly concerned, back then, with the premise of limitless resource. I had no problem with that concept until recently.
I don't know what the solution is, but I no longer believe in squandering borrowed money on crap that falls apart so some top heavy Wall Street bank can overpay people who have no other purpose in life than skimming off the top.
Or lifetime employment (a k a wage slavery) to pursue same...
Or a lifetime of food stamps to buy plastic crap made in Guongzhou.
Banzai, that was a load of absolute crap if i may say.
Keep your feet on the ground and think about reality/realistically when you're given concepts. From your real experience think (throughly) about new issues.. are these concepts what you've experienced or know from an historical perspective proves true? It helps you not to swallow canned space crap from insidious Commies like BS Boulding. Here let me help you with a few;
".. it is up to the man on the street to absorb all the pain and suffering that accompanies radical economic contraction.."
the usual socialist set-up.. powerless victim ...the sitting duck ..."someone pleeeease save me" ...because i spend all my time moaning and cannot possibly look after let alone save myself ...maybe one day a Martian will land and take all the negatives away from my miserable life (pleeeease) as i'm way to fuking lazy and spoilt to take on the challanges of life ..where's my dummy? ...is it time for my nappy change yet?? ..what has Mummy cooked for dinner?
"He does not offer any immedate solutions.."
No he just offers fear which his peanut sized brain is too dim-witted to work through to find solutions to the problems that he doesn't realise do not exist
Because (real) men find real solutions to real problems and turn them into commercial ventures. Worthless lazy tossers like Boulding just worry and bleat and whine about 'problems' and "offer no immediate solutions" ..clueless and useless ..you're buying the book Banzai?????
"..His ideas about how and why we humans discount the well being of future generations are also interesting."
Did the last generation leave us in the shit Banzai? Or the generation before that, or before that, or before that?
Forgive me but does not every generation not enjoy a better standard of living, a more comfy existence and a longer life expetency? That is the reality is it not? You only had to think through that fear and test it against human history for 10 minutes to realise Broughton is talking space shit
His brain is pickled in academic garbage because he has not experienced the (real) world and has not earned a real living. He's a spoilt brat who needs to go work in the fields and pick potatoes (a sure cure for slackers).
Test concepts against reality, human history and your own real experiences Banzai ...you'll save yourself a fortune on books!
"Forgive me but does not every generation not enjoy a better standard of living, a more comfy existence and a longer life expetency? That is the reality is it not? You only had to think through that fear and test it against human history for 10 minutes to realise Broughton is talking space shit"
Zero, equating life expectancy, GDP and iPads with quality of life (my father had but not me, though I have more stuff and more money), not to mention equating the same (conservative social delusions) with mathematics, physics and/or biospheric sustainability is complete non sequitor.
The whole point of this site is: game over; rules have changed; your results will vary; invest accordingly... I mean, if "technology will save us" (hopium) as you seemingly imply, then please explain: the rise in the price of gold (panic, mania, herding)? Rise in oil (1912-2012)? Inflation? Deflation? Poverty? Hunger? Disease? To confuse incremental engineering improvements (and the very real limits thereof) with the eternal earthly SALVATION you imply is just magical thinking.
if you don't have a better quality of life than your Dad, inspite of you having more money, iPads and a longer lifespan to enjoy these material things you first don't appreciate what you've got and second don't know where to shop, or holiday or how to have fun (try chemicals every so often, loosens you up and gives you some fab ideas)
Regards our times they are truly historic.. we've lived through a great growth period floated on credit (debt).. like it or not it's been fun while it lasted ...but don't we also deserve the flip side of the coin, what will be an historic scorched-earth downside?
know me and 'hopium' is the last delusion you'll find.. i try to be practical and sound in my moves and plan to get through this Great Depression (2007-2017) relatively unscathed and maybe even prosper.. I can't save the world nor can hundreds of socialists pissing away vast quantities of other peoples money (here's looking at you O'Bumma).
Saving others is not how the world works because it's based on individualism, not/never collectivism
So I wouldn't offer anyone "salvation" only the best advise i could give ..i hate the very idea someone would give up their personal decision making and want to be led...
people should listen to many and varied ideas and people but never give up anything you have to them and always choose your own path. Save yourself, nothing else has ever worked but that fundamental historical truth
In the meantime, try to alleviate some suffering: http://www.worldvision.org
We can save it for another post, but the question of the comparative quality of modern life is not a slam dunk.
heard a guy make an interesting observation the other day he reckoned Americas peak was the 50-60's as demonstrated in their chromed finned cars ...i think he's about right, that the US has effectively not progressed (wealth) since those highly productive manufacturing base days (US cars sure haven't been any great shakes)
You're a fucking idiot.
you're a number with a bag over your head
you want to be listened to or hit with a baseball bat?
You have to admit, he is one of a kind. ;-)
At least he said "you're", and not "your" as I would have expected.
Even more surprising, not one word about cocksucking.
...er...
History is replete with examples of great expansion then tragic contractions.
Dark Ages, Irish potato famine, great Depression USA?
@ EB - technically winter is a "tragedy" eevry year as we can't grow anything ...but we've got over it ...we can even manage our way through potatoe famines now as well
so we get better every generation that's my point.. we don't get worse nor do we leave the next generation in the shit ..we have thousands of years of human history to test theories against as a starting point to see if ideas hold any water
I don't think this is just a USA problem we are facing. And I certainly don't see anyone but RP saying we should be addressing the live within our means issue.
You live on your planet, I'll live on mine, where we encourage free thinking.
no problem with "free thinking" Banzai
i was simply engaging (you) in a free debate...
..about this space cadets ideas and offering a reality-check that you filter those ideas through your experience (that's our primary learning process) and further, banging ideas (or nonsense) against human history
Why doesn't socialism work, it's a great idea sharing the wealth around?
Because it's failed everytime it's practiced and worse still, stone cold bankrupted every nation ..that's the reality-check
and that's my contribution to your thread, take it or leave it, peace and love
I appreciate everyone's contribution, in the spirit of fight club.
Let me just reconfirm in public, that I am not and never was a so called socialist, let alone communist. However, I am happy to question the premises underpinning the centrally planned global economy we now live in, whatever you want to call it. It's becoming more evident every day that the planners screwing everything up are not the cabal of corrupt communists we defeated 20 years ago.
Given the fact that the surface of a planet is NOT the correct place for an expanding technological civilization, WHY is no one coming up with ideas on how to get off this miserable rock?
any system can be defined as closed. the economy is a closed system because the risk of a black swan is defined outside the normal distribution of events. (a black swan event is always outside the parameter of normal events, get it?) all economies are a matter of policy, not empirical science. (why would anyone create a system that didn't work?) then as a question of policy we have elections, referendums, statistics, which examine the appropriateness of the policy, but the policy always works whether we like it or not)
why did recovery from the Great Depression/2008 crash take so long, is it or was it a failure of policy, or did the new normal after the crash make a recovery a sort of black swan event? was embracing the status quo in policy the wrong thing to do? did the current economic closed policy system define recovery out of the equation? since all economics are basically status quo systems designed to run smooth and predictable rates of growth, which is just what we're getting now, however preserving the current rate of growth means handcuffing the economy to zero growth.
been reading Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis, and highly recommend it, to understand how status quo development guarantees global poverty no matter who is in office.
like this stuff Wm7, it gives us something to consider.
Communists like Mike Davis guarantee global poverty, and enslavement. Reds = State Capitalists.
Poor Newton --- I guess somebody else is going to have to fill the post of Dictator of the Moon now.
Shades of Malthus circa 1820?
The author makes some valid points, but humans (some) will adapt aided by technology.
As far as population growth is concerned in the author's equations....linear projections are rarely accurate.