Systemic failure is generally the consequence of pushing self-correction mechanisms beyond their response limits. (more…)Hi folks,
…this week’s global run on credit seems like a casebook example of how a natural system failure to provide growing physical returns on investment would effect financial commitments for endlessly growing financial returns. They naturally conflict.
One thing we can do is watch it closely, so others may learn from our experience. Because systemic collapse is a big physical process in a big physical system, displaying all-together new kinds of rapidly spreading behaviors, watch for that. If you see that sort of thing perhaps you’ll ‘believe your eyes and ears’ and not feel the observations were ‘planted’ in your imagination somehow.
There are quite a number of “systems of systems thinking”, that I broadly describe the history of in my entry in the Encyclopedia of the Earth on Complex Systems. Every science made up its own, for example, which are sometimes linked and sometimes not really linked much at all. It’s a problem, [...]
Bill Rees asked some excellent questions about my submission to the Long Term Capitalism Challenge to use natural principles for managing growth to sustain the profitability of our economic system. I think I made good responses too. _________ Hi Jessie – Thanks for the opportunity to review your proposal. I agree [...]
The collection of “Hacks” for the Long Term Capitalism Challenge offered byHarvard Business Review, McKinsey and MIX, for the M-Prize for Management Innovation now has this proposal from me… Please leave comments on my on the MIX site (here too is fine of course). It’s a nice new version of the [...]
A pair of systems thinking posts on how why the natural way to reform capitalism and bring about its stable and healthy climax. is to turn the world’s accumulated investment funds (the savings of individuals) endowments for their owners purposes other than piling up more money. JLH Group: Systems [...]
There have been three posts on Dot Earth on a strategic change taken by some leading conservation advocates, led by Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy. His view presented in Peter Kareiva, an Inconvenient Environmentalist is that environmental conservation is meeting less success due to “doom and gloom” advocacy, that [...]
In Continuing the Conversation on Resilience John Fullerton offered a provocative summary and invited more comments on the subject that started with examples found from Bill Reese and Donnella Meadows of resilience as “a Double Edged Sword”, like either social or biological diseases that change to become resistant to treatment. My comment on [...]
John Fullerton in “The Double-Edged Sword of Resilience” on the Capital Institute blog, reported on separate research by Bill Rees and Donella Meadows, on immune resistant disease as examples of how resilience can be a mortal threat. My comment was: __________ These are good examples, but they aren’t the ones [...]
Over the years I’ve made various attempts to give people a good set of principles for introducing my way of observing and understanding the workings of natural environmental systems (1). 9 steps of discovery A suggestion that I try again resulted in the following page, describing 9 steps of discovery. They’re [...]
Marinella posted on NECSI: I’ve found this research really interesting, as it goes (finally!)against our deepest beliefs in human (in)ability to collaborate and be socially engaged without specific behavioral rules. People behave socially and ‘well’ even without rules Fundamentally people behave in a social and rather compassionate and ‘good’ way rather [...]
There seems to be no news yet. The recent 40th anniversary meeting at the Smithsonian on the publication of “The Limits to Growth” and the clearly most urgent of our many dire environmental dilemmas of our time, with little exception, has gotten almost no attention in the mainstream popular [...]
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