"The interesting option is to figure out what the Interesting options are."
And that may be very difficult. The simplest would be to arrange regulation and taxation so that the curves of increasing concentration of wealth and income were turned in the opposite direction. That would allow some evolution and create increased hope for more equal participation. As the wise man said, "We have a business culture that knows how to create wealth, but not how to distribute it" What of deeper more profound possibilities? We often hear lose talk about the interchangeability among energy, entropy, information, and money. If this is true, we could see that money is just a subset of a larger class of "wealth" of which perhaps real intelligence (the kind that is both rational and deals with meaning for the species)is the more interesting example. If this is true, then the "wealth" in human capacity is already more evenly spread (I am assuming that genetics plus life experience is not much smaller than genetics pus life experience plus formal education) and would allow us - or force us - to reassess what "economy" is all about. Certainly what drives accounting practices is the recognition that some major component of wealth is not captured by the existing system. And it might lead to a different, and highly successful new kind of entrepreneurialism, a kind that could put together this new kind of wealth and compete with the existing system. Does this line of thought have any potential? Aristotle, in "Coming to be and passing away" wrote that we can have growth without development (adding water to wine) and we can have development without growth. (replacing a simple tile floor with a more complex one). This also hints at new ways of thinking about the economy. -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.15.18/584 - Release Date: 12/12/2006 11:17 PM ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
