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Philosophy
2021
REFERENCES AND QUOTES
DOUGHNUT ECONOMICS: SEVEN WAYS TO THINK LIKE A 21ST-CENTURY ECONOMIST Behind every successful company/innovation is the state. 73 Colonization of the commons, controlling ideas and knowledge. Innovation happens without immaterial law. 161 Spread the knowledge 164 I ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS – PRINCIPLES AND APPLICATIONSSustainable scale and just distribution 12 Knowledge imprinted in physical structures 40 Knowledge cuts both ways, e.g. asbestos, CO2. Inequality of knowledge, “The level of policy in a democracy cannot rise above the average level of understanding of the population. In a democracy, the distribution of knowledge is as important as the distribution of wealth.” 41 Excludable and nonrival goods. Intellectual progress is a collective process 173, 174, 175 Research done for other reasons than profit, advancing knowledge for example. Patent of rice 175 Patents and copyright slowing down progress. Problems of medicine and patents. AIDS medicine for example. 176 Market cannot handle pure public good. Public goods are nonrival and nonexcludable. 177 Patent prevents research in public good medicine. Bias against invention of public goods or technologies that support public goods. Control of communicable diseases is a public good. 181 13 of the 1240 new drugs 1975-1996 relating to rich, not 19 tax payer paying for private profit. Sismondi, we need a social and ethical filter to select out the beneficial knowledge.182 Market failure and water. If economics rule rich can water their lawn while poor cannot afford water to their crops. 197 Henry George and land value. The elderly lady and the butterfly. 199 97 % of patents owned by developed countries 372 Patents are created monopolies. Doesn’t have to throw them just restrict the domain and length. Share knowledge! 373 Box 19.1 on invention invented without profit motive. 374 I THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER Success to the successful trap 126 “Using accumulated wealth, privilege, special access, or inside information to create more wealth, privilege, access or information are examples of the archetype called “success to the successful.” This system trap is found whenever the winners of a competition receive, as part of the reward, the means to compete even more effectively in the future. That’s a reinforcing feedback loop, which rapidly divides a system into winners who go on winning, and losers who go on losing.” Luck in monopoly. Trump and other rich in life. “If the winning takes place in a limited environment, such that everything the winner wins is extracted from the losers, the losers are gradually bankrupted, or force out, or starved” Success to the successful is known as the competitive exclusion principle in ecology. 127 Success to the successful and Karl Marx. Reinforcing feedback loop of capital accumulation. Monopoly creation. The trap makes rich richer and poor poorer. Poorer and education, credit ability and land. 128 Feedbacks perpetuate inequitable distribution. Diversify! but will not work for the poor. Put in balancing feedback loops. Level the playing field, periodically! Potlatch 129 “These equalizing mechanisms may derive from simple morality, or they may come from the practical understanding that losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field.” 130 Information holds systems together. Information is power 173 I THE ECONOMICS OF THE COMING SPACESHIP EARTHEarth 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. 3 Is information, knowledge most important system? 4 Knowledge key to human development, Germany and Japan vs Indonesia. Definition of knowledge. Entropy to all three types of system. 5 Entropy and information 6 Increasing information and entropy. Europe vs China in 1600. 7 I MEASURING REGENERATIVE ECONOMICS: 10 PRINCIPLES AND MEASURES UNDERGIRDING SYSTEMIC ECONOMIC HEALTH“A flow network is any system whose existence arises from and depends on circulating energy, resources, or information throughout the entirety of their being.”“While most people associate the term “energy” with various forms of fuel (oil, gas, solar, etc.), in ENS, it refers to any kind of flow that is critical to drive the system under study. Ecologists, for example, study the flow of carbon and oxygen in the biosphere; food-security researchers study the flow of produce, grains, and commodities; and industrial economists study the flow of minerals and industrial products. The circulation of money and information is particularly critical in socio-economic networks, and these flows are always closely linked to networks and processes of energy.” Flux density. “Robust, timely circulation of critical resources is essential to support a system's internal organization and processes and, the more organization there is to support, the more nourishing circulation is needed..” 16 Poor crosscale circulation leads to necrosis. Fractal branching structural pattern. Health of the whole. Regenerative = self-renewing 17 “We believe the framework these early economists were looking for is one of a metabolic system, particularly one that is designed to be naturally self-renewing (i.e., regenerative). In this metabolic view, economic vitality rests first and foremost on the health of the underlying human networks that do all the work and underlying environmental networks that feed and sustain all the work.” 17, 18 Regenerative society. Collective and collaborative learning. “Here, the web of human relationships and values is also more important than GDP growth per se because a society's vitality e i.e., its ability to produce, innovate, adapt, and learn e depends almost entirely on these relationships and values. Cultural beliefs are important because they determine the obstacles and opportunities, incentives and impediments extant in the society. Manmade incentives, for example, affect whether an organization works primarily to serve its customers and civilization, or to maximize its owners' profits regardless the harm done to people and planet.” “Putting all these elements together suggests that the elements of regenerative economics fall into four main categories: 1) circulation; 2) organizational structure; 3) relationships and values; and, 4) collective learning. While we present them separately for clarity, all of these categories are in fact inseparably intertwined and mutually-affecting.”“As stated above, 1. circulation affects economies in much the same way it affects living organisms and ecosystems as an essential factor in the metabolism, maintenance, and motive force. Robust cross-scale circulation nourishes, energizes, and connects all the complex collaborative functions a socio-economic system needs to thrive. Circulation's impact on the economic is easy to see. Major influxes of money, novel ideas, information, resources, and fuel sources (e.g., coal, oil, wood) have spurred major economic development throughout history. Circulation also teaches us that where money, information, and resources go is just as important as how much of it there is. In Keynesian terms, poor economic circulation to the working public - including lost jobs, low wages, closed factories, and crumbling infrastructure - reduces aggregate demand, which undermines economic vitality regardless of the size of GDP. Using our economic metabolism model, we say poor economic circulation causes economic necrosis, the dying-off of large swaths of economic tissue with ensuing damage to the health of the whole.” 2. Organizational structure “…vitality requires balance and integration of sizes that combine the best of both worlds, i.e., large and small, resilient and efficient, diverse and focused.” “Today's challenge, therefore, is to build integrated enterprise networks that connect small, medium, and large elements in common-cause and in service to the health of the whole. This challenge is also seen in such diverse fields as politics, healthcare, education, and urban planning.” See THINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on goals. 3. Relationships and values. “Mutually beneficial relationships and common cause values are critical to long-term vitality because economic networks are collaborations built of specialists who produce more working together than alone, even if emerging as an unintended consequence.” Metcalfe’s law. Reed’s law. 18 “Common-cause values such as trust, justice, fairness, and reciprocity facilitate collaboration and are the bond that holds specialists together. Self-interest is part of the process, but mutual benefit/reciprocity and commitment to the health of the whole are vastly more important because specialists must work together in interlocking circuits such that the health of every individual depends on the health of the whole. Injustice, inequality, and corruption increase instability because they erode unifying values. A mountain of sociological research confirms these facts (e.g. Refs. [33-35]).” See THE SPIRIT LEVEL: WHY MORE EQUAL SOCITIES ALMOST ALWAYS DO BETTER 3. Collective learning. “The self-organizing story of evolution sees humanity as a collaborative-learning species that thrives by forging new understandings and changing our pattern of life by changing our beliefs about how the world works. Here, effective collective learning is humanity's central survival strategy and the keystone to longterm vitality.” Jared Diamond on societies collapses as a failure to learn. Principles of regenerative economics. 1. Maintain robust, cross-scale circulation of critical flows including energy, information, resources, and money. “Cross-scale circulation of money, information, and critical resources is important because all sectors and levels of our economic metabolism play mutually supportive, interlinked roles. Workers, for example need employers for wages and products, and employers need workers to produce products. At the ecosystem and biosphere scale, flows of energy, water, carbon, nitrogen, and other key biophysical currencies are both essential for the long-term sustainable operation of societies and economies, and they are amenable to quantitative analysis and whole-system understanding as for other flow networks.” Keynes. 19 Though such self-organizing processes develop along directional trajectories, they never fully reach an end destination. As a result, evolutionary development appears as a recursive process of trial-and-error learning following a cyclical, punctuated, stair-step pattern of increasing complexity (Fig. 7).”“Here, what we call “information” began as tiny energy nudges e a few photons of light or the chemical trail we call smell e that physically interacted with the system. ‘Intelligence’ began when some energy nudge accidently propelled the system toward a beneficial outcome, such as food to fuel continued activity. Information processing evolved rapidly after that because organisms that reacted fruitfully to informative nudges survived longer than ones that did not." “From the first living organisms to consciously-learning systems such as societies, information, organization, intelligence, and communication became ever more profoundly entwined and central to survival. As single-celled organisms evolved into multicellular organisms and eventually into herds of multicellular organisms, communication, i.e., circulating information among members, became essential to coordination and coherence in these increasingly vast wholes. Intelligence and communication eventually evolved into culture, language, and science because processing information and preserving lessons collectively vastly increases a group's chances of survival as well.” See metaphor language i Common cause och THE EMPATHIC CIVILIZATION: THE RACE TO GLOBAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN A WORLD IN CRISIS, Shared belief. Knowledge is relational. Schrödinger, Oppenheimer.“Humanity is the cutting-edge of this evolutionary learning process on earth. We are a collaborative-learning species that thrives by pooling information, collectively forging new understandings, and changing our pattern of life by changing our best hypothesis about “how the world works” [63]. This ability has allowed us to adapt more rapidly and innovate more powerfully than any other earthly species. It is directly responsible for all the marvels we live with today. Yet, human learning too is never done. Despite humanity's adaptive talents, every pattern of civilization eventually reaches limits that force a choice: cling to old ways and decline or innovate and transform. Today's most crucial innovation may well involve learning to live and flourish within the limits [64].” 19 “Violating a distribution balance leads to the usual sequence: excessive concentrations of wealth excessive concentrations of power positive feedback loops that accelerate the suction of wealth to the top. The result is economic necrosis e the dying off of large swaths of economic tissue due to poor circulation and malnutrition. Consequently, institutional economists Acemoglu and Robinson [65] show that excessive extraction is the most common reason Why Nations Fail. RE #9 would identify, distinguish, and reward practices that construct capitals and capacities as opposed to simply exploiting existing natural or human-made capitals.” SeeTHINKING IN SYSTEMS – A PRIMER on “Success to successful” 24 I THE SCIENCE OF FLOW SAYS EXTREME INEQUALITY CAUSES ECONOMIC COLLAPSE“According to a recent study by Oxfam International, in 2010 the top 388 richest people owned as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population– a whopping 3.6 billion people. By 2014, this number was down to 85 people. Oxfam claims that, if this trend continues, by the end of 2016 the top 1% will own more wealth than everyone else in the world combined. At the same time, according to Oxfam, the extremely wealthy are also extremely efficient in dodging taxes, now hiding an estimated $7.6 trillion in offshore tax-havens.[3]Why should we care about such gross economic inequality?[4] After all, isn’t it natural? The science of flow says: yes, some degree of inequality is natural, but extreme inequality violates two core principles of systemic health: circulation and balance. Circulation represents the lifeblood of all flow-systems, be they economies, ecosystems, or living organisms. In living organisms, poor circulation of blood causes necrosis that can kill. In the biosphere, poor circulation of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. strangles life and would cause every living system, from bacteria to the biosphere, to collapse. Similarly, poor circulation of money, goods, resources, and services leads to economic necrosis – the dying off of large swaths of economic tissue that ultimately undermines the health of the economy as a whole. In flow systems, balance is not simply a nice way to be, but a set of complementary factors – such as big and little; efficiency and resilience; flexibility and constraint – whose optimal balance is critical to maintaining circulation across scales.”“All of these processes help the already rich concentrate more, and circulate less. In flow terms, therefore, gross inequality indicates a system that has: 1) too much concentration and too little circulation; and 2) an imbalance of wealth and power that is likely to create ever more extraction, concentration, unaccountability, and abuse. This process accelerates until the underlying human network becomes exhausted and/or the ongoing necrosis reaches a point of collapse. When this point is reached, the society will have three choices: learn, regress, or collapse.” https://evonomics.com/science-flow-says-extreme-inequality-causes-economic-collapse/To encouragement
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