Good Morning, ----- Original Message ----- From: "gav" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 2:47 AM Subject: Re: [MD] growth and sustainability
gav > okay someone please explain to me how a profit-based economic system (ie capitalism) can be sustainable. ie how can we avoid the boom - bust - war cycle that has characterised capitalism in practice for the past century or so. mel a profit based economic system (and ultimately they all are in operation, which I'll get to in a minute) can be sustainable in much the same way as an atmospheric system can be sustainable. After all it's not like an atmospher has high or low pressure, still or wind, clear days and world-rocking storms. --a joke, but you see the point. Animal populations do the same thing, oscillate. Equilibrium is merely operation in an 'average range' sense...more an intellectual myth than a useful reflection of the real, as much artifact of a conceptual snapshot in time as anything. Operational economy is a dynamic, emergent social behavior as seen in its agregate. Economics is an intellectual attempt to model the economy to try and understand it. Don't confuse the two. Theintellectual attempt is a very young endeavor, but a few centuries old and there may have been significant boom-bust cycles over millenia that crashed whole civilizations, 'composting and fermenting' them into fodder for the next wave of aggregate behavior by people. Like the life-cycle of stars. Best we not get too attached in the long run to thinking we have somehow escaped that same behavior. However, returning to my assertion that all economies utilize profit. The Rus merely used theirs to fund too-large a military for their profit-load, hence it's collapse. Chinese (post 1949) went through numerous cycles as they discovered their economy was barely manageable for anything but four-out-of- five years of farm surplus to feed their population. All the while the people kept working, individually, to create what was in aggregate a shadow economy based on trade, barter, 'illegal' buying and selling, and that "wild market" economy was eventually recognized, (I'd love to know by whom) as a more vital part of the probable success of stability for China than the old five-year and great-leap planning could achieve. gav > of course i am presuming that we all consider depression and war things to be avoided. (general assent here?) > mel Not so fast...depression, at least the 'great' one, was a composite entity of the natural wave-trough motion of oscillation magnified by a clear case of "central planning" intervention by government. They did in all sincerity the best they could for all the right reasons and achieved the worst possible outcome because they made all the wrong moves. War is just the violent response of societies for any of several reasons and a much longer more complex discussion. Although there is some good that comes from the effort, oddly enough. Population mixing, cultural inter-fertilizing, subsequent trade, better after-the-fact understanding, knowledge exchange, etc. The PAIN of an outcome doesn't make it 'wrong', just individually undesirable. thanks--mel Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
