Doug wrote: >> "The interesting option is to figure out what the >> Interesting options are."
> And that may be very difficult. What seems different about my approach is the rigor. It applies to all systems. The 'subjective' part that underlies it is the recognition that natural systems are physical, not imaginary. Imaginary systems are projections that need not function, and physical systems need to function. One of the distracting facts is that though there are easily estimated physical limits to any combination of resource uses, it has been common in the growth of the economy for growth to cause changes in which resources are being used to others with no immediately apparent limit. That's the appearance Michael is raising by mentioning "how the most valuable things in the world are increasingly virtual". That's one reason I focus on the internal limits of growth rather than the external ones. We're simply not going to change the fact that it's humans that have to operate the systems we build, and both the people and the systems have to function. We know something about human weaknesses even if we can fool ourselves about the earth's infinite potentials. The ultimate problem is the lag times in decision making as the growth of productivity allows and requires us to make decisions with ever wider impacts in ever less time. If you're honest about it, what you find is that otherwise unbounded growth always runs into an impenetrable wall of confusion. It's like the proof that the best straight line approximation of an positive exponential is a vertical line at whatever time you ask the question. What you look for, once you understand that hitting that wall is an eventual certainty, is the empirical evidence of it happening. The evidence that the switch in our 500 year economic growth process is under way is abundant. As I understand it, given the complete inability to respond to any of the observation methodology questions I've raised, the entire computational systems research movement has discarded the observation method for learning about things, and so wouldn't know about that. > 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. I think that would have the usual negative side effects of imposing political controls on 'free' markets. Another option that might allow the free markets to operate as well or better than they do presently is for people to spend their returns on investment. How that emulates the feedback switch nature uses to resolve growth creatively may not be obvious at first. The trick is imagining something that systems can do to resolve their growth system contradictions from the inside. > 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. I think that's the second time this has been brought up. It seems logically implied that if humans changed to see their definitions of 'good' and 'better' as qualitative improvement in delivering the same services we might create an infinite scale of 'virtual' wealth in perfecting things and therefore have no physical limits to growth. It sounds 'snaky' to me, because at the limit people would be expected to pay more and more for differences so subtle they would be unable to discern them. In the real world the utopians who have taken something like this approach in the past also seem to have put themselves at a competitive disadvantage and been pushed aside. I think the better choice is the one I observe being used by nature, spending the returns instead of reinvesting them. Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com ============================================================ 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
