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My posts are now going to my updated blog. The updated blog is Synapse9.com/signals and you need to go there and subscribe the RSS feed for it or subscribe from this RSS feed link.
As of today 7/24/11,
subscribers to this blog have missed 8 new posts
on the new blog…
I’ll be switching from posting at “synapse9.com/blog” to “synapse9.com/signals” where I’ve installed a more functional blog. Nothing much fancy happening, but upgrading the tools of my original blog to Wordpress 3.1.3.
You’ll still find this collection of posts covering the past 6 years of comment and research notes on the new science for a natural world here, until I figure out how to transfer them. Please do come there and subscribe to the RSS feed to keep following my new work and explorations of the subject.
My research archive, The physics of happening, is still at my domain along with my collections of images, reference libraries, introductions and writing www.synapse9.com.
The old blog site just got to be a problem, unable to archive the posts except by printing them to PDF’s (!), unable to separate the spam from comments, no text formatting options, etc. …It was kind of primitive.
My subjects and writing style, of course, will remain just as “primitive” as before…(whether you saw that as a liability or benefit I leave to you), so the software upgrade won’t really change anything but the look and feel of the pages. 
What’s the cost of increasing investment when you’re already over-invested…??
Many organic and environmental systems display talents for taking care of themselves we could use, using internal steering to avoid approaching hazards and be responsive to change. In studying how they do it one comes across some wonderful new lines f practical of environmental systems research.
fyi - originally posted to World Ecology Research, a related recent post here is Where I’ve gotten so far
Natural systems display remarkable feats of self-control, but studying them fail to connect with the current scientific paradigm for representing everything as controlled by external forces, described by equations. The internal steering mechanisms within natural systems, organisms and economies, etc, are continually reorganizing in much too fluid ways to be described by any kind of equation, or rules for collections of automatic agents either. The continued interest of the sciences remains only entirely about control theory, unfortunately.The lack of interest within science hasn’t stopped people from productively exploring the territory, only prevented communicating with our wider intellectual culture. If you look at recent scientific history there were a number of scientists who made great contributions to understanding natural systems, whose work on other questions was accepted while their insights into considering complex systems more like organisms was discarded. It’s not hidden from view at all, for example, that nature arranges environmental systems is as cells of organization. Those cells of organization also clearly emerge from their own environments, by a self-animated complex process of growth. One needs only ask whether that organization is delivered from the outside or generated within, to observe that complex systems seem to grow by exploiting their environments not being controlled by them. Their organization develops internally.
So, my view that our intellectual culture now finds itself a simply huge stack of “overdue homework”. Just how extremely overdue that homework is may make it seem like nearly starting over, with the whole project of learning about the earth. For the past several centuries we have been making ever greater strides by multiplying our control of everything on earth, only now to find the process itself going out of control … Considered as a whole system, our profits from controlling nature were constantly allocated by the capital markets to multiply our control of nature, taking it too far to now to gracefully recover from.
What we need are the secrets of nature, how her growth systems come to a climax of vitality rather than of exhaustion. Oddly the first person to notice the elementally simple investment allocation strategy for doing that was J.M. Keynes. He actually wrote the whole concluding chapter of his theory of economic growth on the subject of its limits. It’s still the correct basic template for how our economic system could exhibit self-control in managing its own growth.
Tragically to the readers of The General Theory the idea appears to have seemed completely alien, and that is why it was entirely ignored as people used the rest of Keynes’ work to build a profoundly unsustainable growth system. As an ecosystem, the strategic use of your profits to multiply your process needs to stop sometime, just to preserve the profitability of the system, whether measured in net-energy terms or a proxy measure of value like money. When the scale of a system is stabilized while it is still profitable, those profits then become available for the self-management task of steering the system that growth built.
In 2011, of course, there is no discussion of whether Keynes’s strategy for saving the growth system from itself would be needed now, or ever, and how much it would be worth to the world economy to survive as both a cultural institution and a physical system. In 2011, 80 years later, it clearly still seems to be such a “shocking new idea” that people perennially just turn their attention to other popular subjects to avoid it. Of course, those more popular subjects are not relevant, in the case the system is not steered to survive physically as well.
Keynes discussion in Chapter 16 of The General Theory, was on the natural limits of money. He presented it as a choice for people accumulating savings in a profitable economy until either they a) choose to stop accumulating savings and use the profits for something else of value or b) have to stop accumulating savings in an economy that generates no profits. Saving financial earnings for more investment as a rule would only stop when aggregate investment earning become zero. Keynes thought it would be fairly easy to have increasing investment become increasingly unprofitable, as of course, we now see with riveting clarity in our present conflict ridden environment, saying:
If I am right in supposing it to be comparatively easy to make capital-goods so abundant that the marginal efficiency of capital is zero, this may be the most sensible way of gradually getting rid of many of the objectionable features of capitalism. Ch 16, iv, pp3
The easy mistake is to confuse his “marginal efficiency of capital” (a measure of the system as a whole) with being a measure of market rates of return. The total of individual rates of return can be zero when the gains of some are canceled out by the losses of others, and measures only reflecting current rates and not enduring rates are misleading as well. By not even looking for when increasing investment would become decreasingly beneficial, economists appear to have never seriously tried to devise a way to measure whether new investment was making the economy more or less profitable in the long run. There was no need, with perpetual growing profit assumed instead. That then becomes the direct cause for economic policy ignoring the crossing point, where erupting financial liabilities went unmeasured and the net life-cycle return on increasing investment went below zero. Because we had not been asking we didn’t learn how to measure, the profitability of the system as a whole.
So Keynes’ strategy is simply and purely to keep the economic system profitable, to avoid effects of compound growth becoming unprofitable. I’ve done some of the key work on the physics of environmental systems that will enable that work, on how to make whole system measures. That’s a study called Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) which shows from a whole environmental systems point of view how to combine “in-house” energy uses with “out-sourced” ones. The statistical finding is that (nominally) 80% of the total energy uses purchased as an operating cost of business are going uncounted. That will help to more accurately measure the real costs of business decisions both today and for the future.
The basic equation of whole system profitability, used to signal the approach of over-investment, can start as simply defining GDP as a “net” quantity, of positive and negative values. The negative GDP values would reflect the foreseeable emerging liabilities of unsustainable development in the past, for example. That might also be thought of as a negative discount rate, as costs not only for mitigation, but for also having to prematurely rebuild the infrastructure of the economy if over expansion has made it unprofitable.
netGDP = GDP + negGDP
as an environmental measure of the accelerated depreciation of the underlying asset due to over-investment in the earth.
One clearly needs to start by carefully choosing only firmly answerable parts of the question to ask, rather than just guessing at totals. You’d want to combine hard measures of clear financial costs with proxy measures to watch carefully, in attempting to make netGDP a true measure of the long term health of the system and the wisdom of its investment choices.
What happens in natural systems is that during initial growth netGDP > GDP as growth fosters growth. After the turning point (where “getting bigger” = “getting too big”) then netGDP< GDP. One of the proxy measures that would seem most helpful, then, is to locate that turning point when the net benefit of expansion and the net liability of emerging conflicts could be seen clearly approaching. That’s the point when the natural role of finance is to switch from "growing the system" to "steering the system", a whole new plan for the use of wealth.
The main cost everyone can understand is climate change. Our hidden financial liability for fossil fuel development is needing to basically redevelop the whole world economy. As a round number we need to get rid of 80-90% of our carbon fuel use, in 30 years. All our development is still carbon intensive, though. There are greatly added liabilities, then, for still becoming further dependent on increasing fossil fuel use, as all the world’s growth strategies are relying on.
One need not have a theory to clearly see how difficult it is to reduce the carbon intensity of GDP. It’s had a remarkably slow and steady historical rate of decline, at about 1.3% per year. So, the only apparent technically feasible way to do it is to lower GDP. Using Keynes’ template, that would done by creditors spending their savings to facilitate that without causing cascading failures in the interests of long term profitability, despite a current loss.
So yes, it’s a big problem, and people are emotionally inclined to do anything but just buckle down and ask the right questions. Somebody needs to, though, so that anyone can have a believable road map for making their decisions in the future. We just don’t have any believable road map in public discussion now. We definitely don’t want to shrink carbon pollution by reducing living space and everything else, by 80%, for everyone to essentially share our homes and live with households with 5 times as many people. That IS the math though. Could we find some sort of equivalent and make the transition profitably? Not in annual terms, but certainly, if we’re asking true netGDP with a view to the future.
As a culture we allowed the assumption that continued growth would always produce current multiplying profits, and we constantly discredited the people from Malthus to the present who pointed out the obvious grand error in that. To now “find yourself in the real world” we need to “study like hell” rather than keep playing games, and the way to make a profit today.
The Systems Energy Assessment (SEA) method of estimating the total energy use of businesses exposes a very large undercount compared to the standard method, commonly on the scale of 80%. That is due to the standard method not counting the energy needed to support the business services a business needs to pay for to operate, whose “outsourced” energy consumption are costs to the environment to count as costs of operating a business. Because of real reasons for such a large undercount and the new method developed to avoid it there are also several wider implications.
These three main wider implications of the method have been added to the notes and resources available for the study of SEA. Each of which would take more explaining, but might also be helpful for suggest the intriguing challenges for learning how to apply science to the task of making the earth work for us, and us to work for the earth at the same time.
1. Realistic Life Cycle Financial Accounting & business balance sheets
Having more accurate ways to estimate the resource demands of businesses provides more accurate ways to estimate a business’s exposure to environmental hazards too, such as the need to change resources as we deplete them and the costs of climate change attributable to business operations. That allows the financial cost to the future be more accurately estimated, and included as costs of business operations. For example, some of the direct financial costs to the future for developing unsustainable businesses and cities and populations could then be shown on “life cycle balance sheets”, for comparing chosen investment strategies and to put on annual business reports for investors to think about.
One of the earliest applications of that would likely be for assessing the global mitigation costs for climate change and energy resource depletion, as a way to establish a “true discount rate” for using investment funds in ways that become ever more unprofitable in the future. It seems likely, for example, that the point at which investors started choosing directions of development with increasingly negative returns for the future could have been a half century ago or longer. The intent, of course would be to provide information to steer the world economy toward recovering from never before having accounted for any future liabilities at all, and now still following a plan for using up everything affordable on earth essentially as fast as the economy could find a use for it.
2. Discovering how much of nature’s working systems are hidden from view.
A second wider implication is for measuring the resource capacity of the earth, as for MDG’s and other purposes. We’re likely to find the same kind of modeling error as for the energy needs of businesses. Our models of business energy operating needs have been overlooking the energy needed by the self-managing parts of businesses, and often overlooking 80% of the real total. So our estimates of the natural capital of the earth available to be used for economic development is likely to be similarly underestimating the needs nature’s ecologies, on the order of 80% perhaps. This is a very important point for plans to monetize all natural resources for creating markets for trading consumption allowances for them. Based on available information, the estimates may be way off. Most of the information needed for that will be naturally hidden from view.
The problem is a persistent conceptual error in describing how natural systems work from what we see, to the point of our often not acknowledging even the existence of natural systems at all. Because they work by themselves and we often just don’t see them at all. People have habitually defined the systems they observe around them as working by information readily available “believing that what you see is what is there”. That fundamental subjective bias of observers is quite natural, but a mistake to trust and will never go away.
The workings of the self-managing parts of both businesses and nature are located internal to their processes and so at first are quite largely hidden from view. We’ll always remain in the dark about how nature “really” works, and always need ways of avoiding excessive interference none the less. It’s a tricky problem to solve. As far as we’re concerned most natural systems will always just operate “in the dark”, like whatever goes on inside a plant or within ourselves.
As a result information models for natural systems always start from very incomplete information, and need to be first used for trying to discover what kinds of missing information there are and when missing information will become important to search for as things change. For SEA a way to compare local and global data gave a good estimate of the scale of missing information about their energy use. That method may not be possible for other system properties or for other kinds of systems.
3. Study of complex systems as both natural objects and abstract concepts
The third wider implication follows from the expansion of the scientific method that SEA provides, the ability of science to refer to “self-defined natural systems” as subjects of science and not be limited to only “data” as it is at present. Being able to identify and refer to some of nature’s units of organization, and not only our numerical measurements, could become a big change. The systems that sciences now study are “theoretical”, generally information systems constructed by scientists, displaying invented relationships between our measurements to fit a mathematical logic for it. That only very informally describes to the working logic of nature’s complex systems.
So SEA advances the direct study and exploration of the naturally occurring organization and workings of environmental systems, expanding on to the work started in fields like network theory and the naturalist and empirical study of natural systems generally. SEA shows how to define environmental systems that work as cells of organization in their environments such as businesses and other things, by locating their functional boundary for studying their systemic use of energy. This topic is also addressed in several places in the SEA research paper, and one might look for them when that becomes of interest.
These notes and others are also linked from the SEA resource site
A somewhat better summary of my work that Rex Weyler found helpful started from a discussion titled “Are Stock Markets Ponzi Schemes or Real Wealth?”. Rex wrote back: “This and the SEA presentation on your site are helpful. Thanks.”
I’m not sure what to think of it. To me and I think to most economists “the stock market” does not direct the economy, just the news media. I think it’s a combined kind of game platform, of mutual pick-pocket, and helps banks tell how credit worthy businesses are.
I added US GDP to the nice history record of US Quads of energy use & Dow Jones prices done by Charlie Hall (1). It seems to expose a bit of a “fraud” in what people have been told the role of the market is supposed to be. Clearly both GDP and energy use have generally followed smoothly progressive curves, and clearly the Dow doesn’t track or lead either. There’s a lot more to why US energy use stopped growing and GDP kept growing, but the DOW really seems to be just sailing around on its own, reflecting no aspect of either pg these consistent indicators of economic through-put.
(1)
Rex replied:
“Phil .. Thank you. Your (and Charlie Hall’s) graph provides a useful contribution to this discussion. These relationships help explain the limits to “real” economic growth, biophysical limits, energy throughput, thermodynamics, and so forth. Your addition of the GDP shows the gap between economic activity and real wealth. (As Daly points out, GDP conflates costs and benefits)…. plus a few more paragraphs”
I responded:
Your post is difficult to respond to, though I surely agree that physics applies. I think I’m working on how to connect physics and economics, with my Systems Energy Assessment method. The world(s) of physical economics are still highly fragmented and not in agreement on including natural systems, though not considering how our economy emulates natural economies seems hard to avoid conceptually.
There’s a secret to why US GDP continued to grow exponentially (till 2008) while energy use started to level off in the 1960’s. The world GDP & energy use curves (at the left) don’t show that at all. For the world, the relative growth rates of GDP, energy, and the ratio of GDP to energy (called Economic Efficiency), are constant over the last 40 years. So something else must be going on to explain why US energy use has not been growing.
(2)
The problem with understanding it all starts with nature being so full of things that behave by themselves. Natural systems are cells of organization for using energy, that independently organize themselves as they grow from the inside. Physics doesn’t accept that model of nature, so it’s not taught in school. It makes us quite handicapped for studying them, as the internal organization of cellular systems is generally invisible to outside observers too.
The choice
The best starting point seems to be to mentally connect the natural succession of growth with the cells of organization that develop by growth. For growth to work, growth systems have both a “working process” and a “seeding process” to pump up more, like population growth works. That seeding process is what changes at the limits, or the whole process fails.
I’m showing the economy as the bubble called “people” in figure 3, and the exchange of products and money from person to person through markets, “money market” and a “consumer market”, just to keep it simple. How the economy grows is by finance acting a bit like a farmer who plants more than he needs so he can plant more each year. That grows to exhaust its resource, of course. The solution that Keynes identified, is for finance to stop planting the extra seed, as not doing would end by making the whole economy unprofitable and like an overplanted field, limited die off’s instead
Communicating that turns out to be difficult, for the above reasons, as well as that people often think having their own opinion is equivalent having well grounded insight into how the complex natural world works, which it not correct. That’s as good a condensation of what I think I’ve found out on the subject myself, anyway. If you want to look further into my approach you might just browse my site, or start from “Why finance has a bigger appetite than the earth” and follow links to the various discussions.
(3)
Aleks Jakulin is a systems scientist, entrepreneur and professor at Columbia University, a very interesting guy, who was invited to present at the June 2011 Foo Camp meeting of rising information space hackers and scientists. The invitation is to present the work of someone else, a nice twist, and Aleks chose to present my work, also incorporating some of my years of discussing our approaches to general systems theory with our mutual friend Stan Salthe.
We chose the working title:
System archetypes & anarchitypes… because my interest has always being in the natural processes that are “model breaking”, like the enduring eventfulness of change and how events are reliably individualistic. Below are some of the notes and images he’ll be working from as he builds a conversation on the subject.
Once you have a reliable image for something, an impression, a belief, an equation or rule, how can you keep clear in your thinking that it’s something of your own invention? Failing to do so seems to be central to the “curse of knowledge” that people can only look into the past, and our rules for things often leave us horribly unprepared for the future.
People might question studying system archetypes for why they’ll be temporary. Partly it’s that knowing where to look for trouble saves time when scanning an environment for important information missing from your model. That in turn leaves you more time for adapting or finding another path of evolution to replace one not worth preserving.
1) What’s the archetype of uniqueness in nature, the defining character of individuality? - Happenings without an archetype to follow? We also call it “eventfulness” or “animation” like a flame that invents every single flicker as it occurs, Or “learning & discovery” “emergence” “evolution” as systems emerge
2) Taking increasing control of their local environments to see where that leads: - Graduate to new environments and new relationships on other scales that change them.
3) So we define it more by what it is not, but then also providing a locus: - for where to discover natural “happenings” and how they are defining themselves; Pointing to the organizationally “impossible” leaps they must somehow find a continuity for achieving; & study the remarkably smooth ways everyday happening behaviors exhibit that as they begin and end
4) We study the common system archetypes: - Like positive or negative feedback, divergence and correction, limiting conditions, etc.; Or other describable behavioral states identified as cybernetic “body parts”
5) But not as stable system designs, no, but as temporarily system designs; Studied for how they produce irreversible changes in their own conditions: - That will lead to allowing their own transformation into other things
6) Human beliefs are not like that. They can remain unchallengeable:- Despite any kind of change in the environment they came from, if that’s what you want.
7) Unavoidably temporary processes make up individually animated systems and how they progress. - Studied as temporary regularities the system will soon not be doing; Leading to conditions in which others behaviors will emerge, like life.
8) Not all individually animated systems are “living” in the usual sense, but: - Every living system is individually animated ; and there seem to be many and diverse varieties of other unstudied kinds; often given common names for their external appearance rather than their internal successions of change.
PDF file of Draft Foo Camp Talk with alternate topics not selected as well
There’s a now famous study of progress in human welfare that betrays how humans are dazzled by positive images, and quite forget what we’re looking at.
Hans Rosling has traveled the world, presented at the TED talks many times and raised huge amounts of money for his work, based on the beautiful data animation videos he has produced, like the one on world progress in human welfare over the past two centuries. It displays the remarkable course of human progress, as proof positive of the soundness of the capitalist approach to economic development and the universal value of creating wealth for all that is evident in the data. It is indeed a remarkable history.
The animated evidence of steady global improvement seems so convincing in the light of the generally pessimistic character of debate over the future of the global environment and human welfare, it’s just overwhelming for many people. Presented with such an affirmative contrarian story about the collective will of mankind, essentially, it becomes all to easy to forget what one is looking at.
What we’re looking at is the behavior of the world economy over the past two centuries, not the future. It shows the record of our being able to consume the resources and cause environmental impacts increasing in scale at compound accelerating rates by a factor of about 1000 by doubling roughly every 20 years (1), which has indeed produced continual improvement in human welfare, though at arguably liner rates of progress(2).
The question, then, is whether that is evidence of a secure plan for the future, as it is clearly suggested to be? Or is that the most convincingly misleading use of the data you’ve yet seen?
Note:
1) That the economy has “increasing in scale at compound accelerating rates by a factor of about 1000 by doubling roughly every 20 years” comes directly from the traditional measure for “real growth” as material progress, for GDP increasing at 3.5% per year. That reflects the average US growth rate since 1880 that seems to have begun around 1800, implying the US economy doubled in size ~10 times during the period of Rosling’s display of human progress. A policy to maximize growth remains the worldwide economic model for the future that everyone discusses.
2) The “arguably linear rates of progress” in human welfare is a conclusion based on the graph displaying a straight line of progress, and not doubling again and again.
3) The doubling rates of use for each individual resource, the scale of environmental impacts, the prices of each resource being exhausted and conflicts generated over scarce supply, all vary considerably, but in proportion to the overall rate pf growth of the economy. How the world markets are presently responding to demand growing faster than suitable replacements for depleating resources can be found is the subject of my 4/30/11 blog post big news… from Henshaw, Grantham &… the earth
For the graph of historic 2000 yr World GDP Growth, below, Maddison combines various proxy measures, intended to match present day records, showing a growth rate for the world economy since 1820 of about 2.6%. It shows the exponential shape of the trend since 1820 as a straight line on a log plot of GDP over time.
The research paper is waiting for publication, with a special collection of Biophysical Economics papers on understanding EROI for business systems and depleting resources for Sustainability (MDPI). Copies of the paper, called “Systems Energy Assessment (SEA)” can be found at the Cornell physics archive, and at the references site www.synapse9.com/SEA, along with other notes.
There are two main findings. One is that if you consider physical causation as a way to trace how energy uses are connected, a business needs to be considered as a whole organization of working parts. At present statistical measures of business energy use treat businesses as just a collection of technologies with no operators or environments. That difference can be measured, and seems to call for a typical increase in the environmental energy use impacts and risk exposures of businesses by about fivefold.
The other main finding is that it seems generally possible, for the first time, to use objective methods to locate the natural organizational boundary of individual net-energy systems in the environment. That allows traditional thermodynamic and net-energy physics analysis and to refer to organizational units of the environment as subjects of natural science.
An exchange with John Baez on his Azimuth blog.
Phil Henshaw says: May 28, 2011 at 1:54 am
I think the actual problem, and why it’s so intractable, is that our “resource management system” is designed to serve our financial system,… not the reverse.
Our financial system is designed to create stable positive financial returns, so people can keep adding their winnings to their bets, and have an ever multiplying “free lunch”. The critical energy management decision necessary for doing as best one can at that (allowing punctuating the endless boom with enough busts all the time…) is to accelerate the economy’s use of inexpensive energy as fast as economically feasible, forever.
What results when people model their implementation of physical law following rules they happen to like for financial law, is it creates a simply enormous explosion of wealth that produces a completely unmanageable society and economic system (instead of a comfortable home on earth).
I think that’s a big part of what is so self-defeating in the human intention to “tame nature” to behave like we think it should. We haven’t seen the value of watched nature to see how it works first.
Reply, John Baez says: May 28, 2011 at 8:56 am
Can you translate these insights into an answer to the question: “What is the one best thing everyone could do to slow down climate change?”
If so, would the answer be some version of “think differently”? Or is there a concrete action that you can propose?
Reply, Phil Henshaw says: May 28, 2011 at 9:27 pm
The theoretically necessary step, that no one seems to understand when stated in abstract terms, is for the net-energy surplus that was first applied to growing the system, now be applied to adapting the system to a finite and fragile planet. The world’s institutional economic models and planning assumes there will never be a need for that, and money can keep compounding forever.
The practical means of changing that comes from J M Keynes, and what to do with money when the economy can’t grow. It follows from how the surplus resources for growing the economy were managed to start with, by the use of profits from investment to proliferate more investment. To keep investment funds from becoming worthless when the economy can’t grow, and make the system manageable again, you’d need to deflate that money spiral. As a personal matter it means the people whose money it it need to stop growing it, and be careful to invest it in good purposes.
That would involve a)devoting investment funds to sustainable development rather “fast money” and b)stop adding investment profits to expand total investment, divesting net profits for some other good purpose. There would be a lot of negotiation as to how to achieve that, of course, as all our institutional plans assume it’ll never occur.
“That would involve a)devoting investment funds to sustainable development rather “fast money” and b)stop adding investment profits to expand total investment, divesting net profits for some other good purpose.”
I’ve been getting traction with some of the leading thinkers in the ethical investment community (John Fullerton, Hazel Henderson and others) by saying it’s a matter of combining “green investment” with “green divestment”, redirecting the savings in the “giant pool of money” for good purpose, to reduce the absolute scale of our demands on the earth.
Keynes actually wrote a whole chapter of his big book on it, Chapter 16 in The General Theory, though due to the cultural belief in perpetual growth his entire profession ignored it completely. I have a scanned copy on my site fyi. It’s readable, but you have to fight through his discussing it in terms of the aggregate variables of the world economic system, entirely ignoring any social or political debate… To find my references to that, and to “the widow’s cruse” parable he first discussed in in terms of, you can browse my blog posts mentioning Keynes –http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=site%3Asynapse9.com%2Fblog%2F+keynes.
Phil
p.s. Yes, now it would seem that the business people of the time took the magical secrets Keynes offered for how to stabilize the growth system for making more and more money, and have now successfully run it completely into an impenetrable wall of natural complications and resource exhaustion, just as Keynes predicted and explained clearly how to avoid. So, the one thing everyone can do is start reducing appetites and investments, while divesting their profits and making that a new truth for society, as they begin to study and understand why.
