Welcome to this new blog. It is hard to get comments published that are not mainstream, nor even a recognised ideology. My perspective comes from examining the present and potential functioning of economies and societies from a quite different moral and intellectual grounding than any recognised branch of economics.
The moral basis is that we can choose to be driven by fear or to be motivated by love. We can cultivate self awareness and knowledge or we can be mired in unconsciousness and ignorance. Trying to live through competition alone is as dysfunctional as trying to live through cooperation alone. The living world is pervaded by competition and cooperation. Taoists long ago perceived that a fulfilling life requires that we balance such polarities: cooperation and competition, yin and yang. An economy is not separable from society. It is the way a society makes its living, and its values and structures are part of the society’s values and structures.. I take the purpose of an economy to be to support the kind of society we choose to live in.
An economy is required also to function according to the imperatives of the living world which, briefly, require living off energy income, recycling all materials, producing no persistent toxins and not taking a large proportion of resources for ourselves. If we lived that way, humanity could continue its adventure indefinitely, potentially growing in sophistication and quality of life, but not expanding its share of Earth’s bounty. If we lived that way the rest of the living world would thrive around us.
The intellectual basis of my perspective is that an economy is a far-from-equilibrium system. Its behaviour is therefore radically different from the sterile and static general equilibrium predicted by mainstream (neoclassical) free-market theory. It is a self-organising complex system, full of nonlinear effects and instabilities. It has many possible states, not just one global optimum. The new complexity economics, is well summarised by Eric Beinhocker in The Origin of Wealth, although the book ontains a lot of the detail of the intellectual foundation, but not the big implications that I draw out in Economia, and in my new manuscript (see New Book page).
I am a scientist who studies the Earth. I have four decades’ experience of judging theories and evidence about how the Earth works. The Earth is messy, and evidence is often incomplete and confusing, just as it is for global warming. I am alarmed that the global climate system may be tipping right now into irreversible runaway that could raise temperatures by six degrees or more, and cause catastrophe for humans and the extinction of half Earth’s species.
In have also learnt of many positive innovations that can allow us to live lightly on the Earth. We could be doing it right now, if only we would listen and learn from what is already being done by many scattered individuals and small groups.
So there’s a mixture of alarm and hope. We must find hope, no matter how dire the situation might seem, otherwise there is only despair.
From such a perspective the passing parade of “news” is mostly trivia, or blind folly. So I try to say a few things that might provide some more meaningful, useful and hopeful knowledge and perspective. Much of what I have been writing, or wanting to write, has vanished into the aether. Hence this blog.
I hope it provides something useful for you. And if you disagree, with me or other commenters, please debate but don’t abuse. Stan Dale said “There is either love or violence. There is either love or a cry for love.”
