:clap: Agree wholeheartedly.

Awareness, connection and collaboration in the face of fear...

And which of the findings are new?

What the guy is talking about is basically a mixed economy. That's not a new idea.

At least it's a healthy start to admit things like the following:

markets, like gardens, must be tended, that the market is the greatest social technology ever invented for solving human problems, but unconstrained by social norms or democratic regulation, markets inevitably create more problems than they solve.

...and that constraining comes through institutions, democratic regulation, legislation, property rights for all.

Add the fact that not everything can be solved by the market mechanism. Even the most devoted libertarian will somehow admit that defense of a country cannot be organized through the markets. Yet this "exception" is the black swan that simply tells us all swans aren't white.

I'd myself add the importance of income distribution, the fact that prosperity comes when employees, not just the shareholders, do get their share of the income. Hanauer refers to this in the following way:

The new economics must and can insist that the purpose of the corporation is to improve the welfare of all stakeholders: customers, workers, community and shareholders alike.

More important would be to emphasize that workers get their share.

And finally, avoid the utter stupidity and destructiveness of socialism. Growth in the Global economy that has cut povetry down has happened when large countries like India and China have abandoned the most destructive socialist policies.

And which of the findings are new? — ssu

Indeed; 10:13:

Now, I want to emphasize that this new economics is not something I have personally imagined or invented. Its theories and models are being developed and refined in universities around the world building on some of the best new research in economics, complexity theory, evolutionary theory, psychology, anthropology and other disciplines. And although this new economics does not yet have its own textbook or even a commonly agreed upon name, in broad strokes its explanation of where prosperity comes from goes something like this.

So neither is your point.

Still sounds like the economics & economic history taught in my university 25 years ago. But that seems not to matter. Better market things as new!

Perhaps there was need of a reminder.

:up: :heart: :strong: :100: :clap: :sparkle:

All the good emoji! First things first... how to convince people that cooperation is not a commie plot?

Perhaps there was need of a reminder. — Banno

Surely there is a need!

Institutions matter and market mechanism doesn't work without societal institutions, starting from things like nobody can put a gun to your head and then say that the "transaction" was voluntary. Besides, back then Historical institutionalism was the vogue in Economic History and I remember reading then for example Douglass North.

The problem is that we often take as an example a corrupt, inefficient kleptocracy and call it "the natural state of capitalism".

It's impossible to stop people from cooperating.

First, successful economies are not jungles, they're gardens —

A great quote. Unfortunately neoliberalism may have had its own logic in paving the way for the move from human-scale economies to inhuman-scale ones. The shift from the "real world" economics of farms, factories and services to the new, more virtual seeming, world of finance economics. Naked global capital flows.

And so "gardening" might still be going on. But at that higher "Davos man" level and not at a human community level, or even at the competitive nation state level.

So going back to the past seems not an option. The world system has been financialised. It is a beast that must now find its next step up or simply collapse - the extinction event that would return any surviving humans to an old fashion community economics and actual gardening if lucky. :grin:

The nature of that next step is the interesting question. To side-step climate change extinction, it looks like we are relying on exponential technology. We have to get off fossil fuels and on to renewables, of course. In a general way, the virtual reality of global capital flows and national debts has to be reconnected to physical reality.

Neoliberalism operated by streamlining the economic realm so that capital was disconnected from the material world in the form of human labour, energy inputs, and most of all, the actual longterm costs of the environment as a sink for the entropic waste that physical effort must produce.

Freed of real world constraints, neoliberalism could run up a tab on this physical and social capital. That allowed the exponential creation of financial capital (in the form of credit. Ie: debt). But now physics is catching up on that streamlined fiction. The entropic sinks that it relies on - a degraded environment, a literally heating climate - are costs becoming due.

The only way out it would seem is technological utopianism - a reconnect of some kind where the physical and informational aspects of being a human organism, the evolving Noösphere, find a new functional balance.

This is the Singularity argument (of which I am always skeptical). But it is also quite exciting that there are now glimpses it could be an economic reality.

Kartik Garda at the ATOM - https://atom.singularity2050.com/ - gives a lucid account of how tech is on the cusp of becoming an unstoppable deflationary force. Tech will drive the cost of everything (even harnessing energy or growing food) down to practically free. Almost all jobs can be automated, creating unbounded growth in per capita labour productivity.

In this next phase of the economic system, the world can not only afford its MMT money printing and Universal Basic Income policies, Garda argues it is already having to pursue them to stave off the early stages of the coming great tech disruption.

The central banks can't generate even a flicker of inflation these days, despite throwing trillions of debt into the maw of the beast since the GFC. And the reason is that tech deflation - the way automation and AI makes all physical products cheaper - is already a counter-force flowing at several percent of the total economy. Garda argues money printing has to become exponential just for its inflationary pressure to balance the exponential rate of tech deflation. And - with the pandemic - that is why the central banks have felt so free to do just that. The money printer goes brrrrrr....

So yes. The existing system is broke. But it is no revelation that "free markets" always are part of something larger - a system of governance that encodes the current economic paradigm.

A market of some kind is still required. It is the intermediating mechanism between the global constraints that govern (the co-operating society) and the local individual action that makes room for the competition that defines us all as self-interested selves.

To be a "human" system, economics has to be aimed at maximising both our collective human identity and our own free expression of "being human" .... as currently defined in our ever-expanding developing human story. So a market - as a cohesive collective space populated by equally individuated actors - is always going to be the heart of the system.

But the question is always about what grand flows is the market equilibrating?

At base, it always has to be a balancing of energy expenditure and intellectual capital. The human adventure is about developing the savvy tricks - fire, tools, gardening, politics - that allow us to harness an ever increasing amount of the biosphere's physical capital.

For the longest time - see Smil's Energy and Civilisation - this was just whatever physical capital that the sun grew. Hunter-gatherer, then agriculturalist. And then came the sugar rush of discovering that fossil fuels could sustain an exponential economic paradigm based on machines (and environmental sinks).

The machine age - the industrial revolution - was pretty grim in many ways. Yet also liberating. There is always going to be good and bad. And overall the human lot became better. And while also unequal, an argument can be made that the inequality is merely a natural powerlaw expression of wealth distribution - what equality looks like in an exponentially growing system that, by statistical definition, has no mean.

The machine age was focused on labour and capital. All our views on left and right, capitalism vs socialism, are founded on the tension between the factory workers and the factory owners - a step up in abstraction from the previous tension of farm labourers and land owners.

The problem to solve was balancing lives at both scales. And post-WW2, this was somewhat sorted by the emergence of social democracies and corporate businesses. You had unions and welfare systems to build in protections for labour. You had "wrap around" corporate structures that were tied into a general notion of being "good citizens" - delivering a return on capital that recognised the need to balance the needs of shareholders and workers.

But capital - as its own abstracted flow - wanted to be liberated from this socialised/physicalised constraints. And so along came neoliberalism as a tool to break down all the accumulated publicly-owned stores of capital - the railways or telephone systems which had citizens as the shareholders - and put them on the market.

Financialisation could then take off as its own thing. It was a way to mine the world of its promised future growth by taking out leveraged derivative bets on tomorrow's income streams. And then eventually, just to mine the promises that fictional growth would surely occur.

We now have that broke system where the central banks - the Fed in particular - have in fact had to socialise the actual asset markets. There is no price discovery in the stock markets if their prices are simply reflecting the largesse of trillions in debt "stimulus" (nor price discovery in terms of the true value of the US dollar that still underpins the world financial system).

But the argument that is currently most believable to me - in this very shaky feeling time - is that we are never going to make a well-designed step backwards into any kind of Green utopianism. The gardening metaphor. That is impossible because thermodynamics is a ratchet - a flow that only has the one direction that spells "growth".

So we have to hope for Tech utopianism to be true as an alternative. And actually act on that expectation. As Garda and others (like Jeff Booth, who wrote The Price of Tomorrow) say, the field of economic punditry is obsessed by the problems of yesterday and not yet seeing the solutions of tomorrow. Someone has to be brave enough to understand what wants to happen as the next step of this story and push it through into the institutions of governance that thus frame the collective space that is the market.

It is a moment where we need revolutionary scale reforms to absorb the contrasting imbalances of unbridled debt creation and exponential (possibly) tech deflation. And of course, the cost of those ecological and environmental sinks have to be including in the grand accounting now. They must be monetised and be a factor in the newly-designed marketplace.

Just as it is to stop people from competing. Especially when money (resources) or women are involved. It's just human nature.

Two men work at a data processing firm. One makes his quotas and just kinda loafs around. The other goes above and beyond with his nose to the grind and makes every minute count. Who do you think would or should get promoted and how could that not potentially be the difference between the company reaching Fortune 500 status, ensuring all its employees are basically set for life and the company going bankrupt and having to lay off everyone?

If you had to have open heart surgery who would you want? The more experienced doctor or the less experienced one? Gotta throw 'em both into the gauntlet to find out who's best.

Absolutely. When you remove the floating abstractions (namely the concept of capital) it's pretty hard to argue against capitalism.

According to Hanauer, successful economies are like gardens: to be tended by some gardener. He says this before reminding us that “the economy is people”, human beings, and not so much like the rows of plants he evoked with his earlier simile. Perhaps he should have evoked a corral or zoo or prison instead of a garden.

It is no surprise then that his “gardening” is to be delivered through the formal means of social control, enforced by the monopoly of violence, and not through voluntary cooperation. Thus he uses his vast wealth “to build narratives and to pass laws that will require all the other rich people to pay taxes and pay their workers better”, thereby increasing state power at the expense of private property and wealth.

Thus he uses his vast wealth “to build narratives and to pass laws that will require all the other rich people to pay taxes and pay their workers better”, thereby increasing state power at the expense of private property and wealth. — NOS4A2

Isn't 'state power' the only thing that protects people from corporations? Power has to be somewhere. Where do you want it to be?

Kev
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↪Outlander Absolutely. When you remove the floating abstractions (namely the concept of capital) it's pretty hard to argue against capitalism. — Kev

Ahhh...unbridled capitalism is easier to argue against than you seem to suppose, Kev. Free Enterprise, which is subtly a different thing, is the thing that it is very hard to argue against.

Isn't 'state power' the only thing that protects people from corporations? Power has to be somewhere. Where do you want it to be?

Corporations do not possess the monopoly on violence because they are comprised of private individuals like ourselves. Because the state has the monopoly on violence it also has the monopoly on power. So what protects us from the state?

In a healthy democracy, the rule of law one hopes, which one hopes reflects the values of the populace. In any case there are many more kinds of power than military and police. Corporations influence the law rather heavily don't they?

When you remove the floating abstractions (namely the concept of capital) it's pretty hard to argue against capitalism. — Kev

If you get rid of the consideration of capital, then you’re not even talking about capitalism anymore, but (probably) just about a free market, which is not the same thing. A free market where capital distribution is at most a negligible factor is market socialism, which is decidedly not capitalist.

So what protects us from the state? — NOS4A2

Sheer number. Free press. Open society. Gunzz. Though I'm hesitant to admit, instant online communication and sharing.

Probably the most important fact being at the end of the day public servicemen and women are just people too.

It is no surprise then that his “gardening” is to be delivered through the formal means of social control, enforced by the monopoly of violence, and not through voluntary cooperation. Thus he uses his vast wealth “to build narratives and to pass laws that will require all the other rich people to pay taxes and pay their workers better”, thereby increasing state power at the expense of private property and wealth. — NOS4A2

$15 minimum wage and increasing taxation for some multi-millionaires and billionaires is exactly what Orwell was talking about, absolutely.

Just as it is to stop people from competing. Especially when money (resources) or women are involved. It's just human nature. — Outlander

So-called "human nature" is culturally, linguistically constructed. There may have been a human nature when humans were pre-agriculturally, presymbolically and unreflectively alive to nature. From what I have seen the paleontological and anthropological evidence points to the predominance of cooperation and lack of hierarchy among gatherer hunter societies. The competition, the competitive "nature" (really culture) arises with the advent of property.

But the argument that is currently most believable to me - in this very shaky feeling time - is that we are never going to make a well-designed step backwards into any kind of Green utopianism. The gardening metaphor. That is impossible because thermodynamics is a ratchet - a flow that only has the one direction that spells "growth". — apokrisis

It seems almost certain that we would not collectively and voluntarily make such an attempt. However if the current system collapses humans may well return in small groups to a hunter gatherer life. Personally I would much prefer to see that than your "pie-in-the-sky" techno-monstrosity future. Luckily I don't think there are sufficient resources to bring that about anyway. Only time will tell.

Say I need a cave to sleep in so I don't get soaked and can have a fire that lasts during a storm so I don't succumb to exposure or hypothermia.

My cave family or whatever have lived there for a generation or two now. We have very epic cave paintings we all enjoy on the walls.

If I don't "own it" what's to stop someone else or rather many persons from entering it and perhaps they don't quite know all we do about fires and dangerous plants or just otherwise bring some contagion in perhaps one we happen to be allergic to. Or decide to draw all over our epic cave paintings.

That'd be annoying if not fatal for one of us. What solutions would you propose that would be mutually-accepted? Again, if there's more people who want to do whatever they want in the cave we've lived in for generations, a "democratic" vote obviously screws me over.

Come up with an answer and please write it out before you unhide the following statement. No peeking.

You are just projecting your modern mindset here in asking for "solutions". Look at social animals: they cooperate and don't go about murdering one another.

Hi Janus. Isn't the problem that on the whole, humans seem to love this "monstrous" future more than they hate it?

So it certainly isn't "my" dream as such. But - for my own sanity - there has to be a reason why the Green movement has been such a consistent failure ever since I was first on board with its ideals in the 1970s.

If nature is in fact an entropic system, then what is the right moral position to take here? Is finding a way for a global population of 9 billion to kick on in the same basic economic fashion a "monstrous" outcome.

If so then nature itself is the monstrous thing. Us old school greenies are caught in the paradox of seeing nature as monstrous. And what is revealed is we had some misunderstanding of nature as a secret garden spoilt by too many of the wrong sort of humans.

I've cited before Vaclav Smil's excellent book, Harvesting the Biosphere.

As a population of currently 7 billion humans now, we harvest about a quarter of all terrestrial plant growth to support ourselves. A third of the earth's ice-free surface has been taken over by agriculture.

So the earth is mostly constituted of domesticated anthropomass - people, cows, sheep, goats and pigs. The quantity of this anthropomass has increased from 0.1% 10,000 years ago, to 10% at the start of the industrial revolution, to 97% today.

The total weight of human flesh is now 10 times that of all wild mammals - that's everything from wombats to wildebeest. And our domestic livestock, our mobile meals, then outweighs that true wildlife by 24:1.

Read the figures and weep if you are a greenie. How could you wind the world back from that in any voluntary fashion?

One can only look forward. The ecosphere is well past the point of no return in being remade in the domesticated (and gardened) human image. We have to accept that trajectory and lean into it to have any chance of avoiding a catastrophic collapse in the next 20 to 100 years.

So what does that future look like - when the earth is even more thoroughly anthropomorphised?

It is going to have to be a world saturated by machine intelligence ... in a way that counteracts our current era of machine dumbness. We've had the fossil fuel Industrial Revolution. We've started the Information Age revolution but are caught between stools as we are still reliant on fossil fuels and it feels like too big a leap to get to renewables.

But as I say, the good news would be if the techno-optimists are right and tech is exponential. An economic rebalancing would become possible if we can return to a hunter-gather situation of living within the energy provided by the daily solar flux, and yet do that with a planet that is some kind of Borg colony of 9 billion and still growing individuals.

A monstrous future or logical destiny of nature itself?

Economics just makes a good lens for examining the realities at play. The moralities of yesteryear are no great guide once the future starts coming at you with exponential speed. Which really started to happen once humans stumbled on the motherlode of fossil fuel (trapped ancient sunlight) and the machines that could release its immense power.

If only it were just my own. You feed a cat or dog wet food they often won't easily go back to dry. Unless they're starving of course. Folks are the same way. And just like animals, they will fight and kill (or at least vote, heh) for whatever they perceive will ensure the continuance of life in the manner of which they've become accustomed. If I double your salary or income today, you would become accustomed to it. And if you found out there's something or someone that may force me to have to return it to what it was... you'd get to thinking. We'll leave it at that.

Sure, social animals cooperate with each other and don't go around murdering one another. They prey on smaller animals. Which is exactly my point. If the irrational (or even rational provided they convince themselves they'll have a guaranteed position of leadership) convince the rational (or anyone) to "follow their mindset/vision/belief" (religion) then those against it could become the minority and are now subject to predation. Fortunately these days that just means being outvoted. lol (usually)

You are eloquent as always, apokrisis, and I agree with you that what will be will be. I think the green movement has been unsuccessful because the proposed technologies are not really green (if all the energy inputs to create, maintain and dispose of them when they have gone past their usable lifespans are factored in). Also solar and wind apart from not being reliable, destabilize the grids the whole economy relies upon, necessitating so called "base load" which can be ramped up or down (and better than coal power can); so we are looking at gas or nuclear it seems.

As to the idea that tech could be "exponential" sources of energy will still be required, and on such a scale I can't see what they could be other than fossil fuels. But production of fossil fuels has apparently peaked, apart from the new productions from fracking, and in relation to the latter, it's arguable that they are not economically viable, and only continue on the back of funds form starry-eyed investors (who by all accounts are dwindling) and government subsidy.

Then there is the EROEI equation to take into account. Money aside, if comes to the point where it takes more than a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil out of the ground then it's not worth it, and we are will be in a downward spiral of diminishing prosperity that would ring the death-knell to the current growth economy. I think that, or something like that is going to happen, unfortunately for humanity. And I hadn't even mentioned global warming!

I see cascading collapses of the current system over some timeframe (who knows how long, but probably less than a century?) Unless we go for nuclear (which has its own suite of problems) or discover workable fusion. But still if the population is something like 9 billion, then industrial agriculture must continue to grow, destroy soils, deplete water sources, pollute the oceans, extinguish habitats and ever more species, and so on. Personally I would rather see a drastic reduction of population; but what will be will be, and there's really nothing I can do about it.

Thanks for the book reference; I'll check it out...and good to see you back!

Fortunately these days that just means being outvoted. lol — Outlander

I think exploitation, and even persecution, of minorities is inevitable under the current system, because there isn't perceived to be enough to go around. I have read an estimate that the Earth could support no more than 200 million people by sustainable organic framing practices. The problem is that it seems impossible that there could be a globally coordinated, cooperative effort to lower the population to that number and sustain a stable non-growth economy.

I think the old chestnut "money is the root of all evil" is close to the mark. With settled agriculture comes property, and from there capital and capitalism seem inevitable.

All your points are familiar. But where I have changed my own position is on having any certainty as to which way the system will go. I certainly used to believe that because the Green Movement failed politically, collapse is locked in.

However now it feels more like a genuine two-horse race. Techno-utopianism could pull off its last minute Gaian twist of a self-organising step to the next "economic" equilibrium state.

Probably not. But the game has got interesting again.

But where I have changed my own position is on having any certainty as to which way the system will go. — apokrisis

I agree; I am by no means certain about how things will unfold either. I don't privilege humans over all the other species, though; and I'd rather see humanity descend back into small groups of hunter gatherers than a highly populated mega-tech future where the wild is irrevocably lost. Call me inhumane, but that's just my preference which means but little in the scheme of things. :smile:

Is it a bad choice to privilege intelligence in a generalised sense?

I can see that there is the view that life is sacred in some (spiritual) sense. So if you believe in that kind of ontology, what you say is consistent with such a backdrop presumption. All life is equal (and the Comos needs to be "alive" too, otherwise its existential meaningless becomes monstrous).

But I am coming from another direction in terms of my backdrop ontology. If I treat reality as a dissipative structure, then that involves the balance of "intelligent" organisation (negentropic structure) and its necessary other in the form of entropy production (or waste heat).

It is a clash of paradigms as usual.

But the probable end of human civilisation while my own children are still growing up gives this debate a certain zing. :gasp: