Once upon a time there was a girl who made beautiful pictures. One
day she made a picture which showed a better way to grow corn. Her
village elders saw the picture and tried the new method of planting
corn. The corn crop was the best they had ever had. So they came to
the girl and demanded that she make more pictures showing ways to
grow more beans and squash. “But we have enough beans and squash,”
she said, The elders yelled at her “We don’t want enough. We
want MORE. (More is
never enough.)
Watt's governor
In the mid-1700s James Watt and others invented steam engines. The
early models had a big problem. Once the engine started, it went
faster and faster until it broke. They needed something that would
control the speed. One of them invented a gadget which whirled
around and changed its position as the engine went faster. They
attached this to the steam valve to reduce steam when the engine went
a little too fast. When the engine slowed, the whirling was slower
and more steam was allowed into the engine. This made the engine go
faster again. They called it a governor and it kept the engine
running only a little faster and a little slower than the perfect
constant speed. (It is
possible to limit “more.”)
The Boy was crazy for nuts. The Boy’s mother kept them in a jar
on a high shelf to keep him from getting at them. But the Boy
discovered that he could climb onto the kitchen counter and just
grasp the jar. He reached in for a nut. It was so good! He reached
for another but knew that he could not stay there eating them one
at a time. He would have to take a handful, replace the jar and
climb down to avoid being caught. The Boy reached deep into the mass
of nuts and grabbed a big handful. But his hand was now too big
to pull out. He kept on trying until his mother came home and found
him. (Greed always
gets caught. Thank
you, Aesop.)
*****
The
financial history of recent times shows cycles of growth and
collapse. Continual growth is not possible. The more fervently
growth is grasped the more certain is failure. The financial system
is so committed to growth as an ideal that even a slower rate of
growth causes financiers to twitch.
This
deep commitment to perpetual growth as the only measure of success is
doomed to failure because it is contrary to a much more powerful
system, that of nature. Financial systems tend to be illusionary to
the extent that they are based on imaginary assets, mostly debt. The
only real assets are on the land. There is a limit to the growth of
these assets, even though financial systems pretend that there is
not. This pretense is found out just as surely as the Boy gets
caught with his hand in the nut jar.
Small
wonder that the economy has collapsed like a card castle. The fall
of one great institution after another should have encouraged people
to explore other ways of mutually providing for each other’s
needs. (Mike Nickerson, whose ideas I have found helpful, calls an
economy “mutual provision.” Thank you, Mike: Life,Money, and Illusion.)
But
little has changed. Business leaders, ironically ones who most
loudly object to Government interference. have their hands out
begging for publicly borrowed money to re-establish the very illusion
whose impossibility brought them down. Political leaders, quaintly
pretending to be reluctant, fall over themselves to oblige. All
parties seek to recreate the very same conditions which have been
shown not to be viable. They yell, as it were, “We don’t want
enough. We want MORE.” And more is never enough.
We
have priceless opportunities (now being lost) to put heads together
to construct other, more naturally tuned ways of managing “mutual
provision.” What might go into such considerations? For one, an
economy should have some stability, a kind of homeostasis much like
living things. The jargon for this, now corrupted beyond honest use,
is “sustainability.”
Life
has evolved two ways with growth: An individual grows quickly at
first, often in bursts of rapid growth alternating with slower
periods. As maturity is reached the growth rate drops to zero but
there is a continual replacement which repairs and maintains the
living system in what looks like a steady state. This state is only
steady within limits. Each component rises and falls, grows and
contracts, continually. (Our bodies are like the axe owned by an old
Ottawa Valley farmer. He bragged that his family owned the same axe
for 80 years. It had four new handles and two new heads!)
The
other natural growth process is found in populations of living things
occupying a new territory. The numbers of individuals grows rapidly
at the highest possible rate until environmental factors intervene to
stabilize the numbers or cause collapse. The human population is in
this rapid growth phase, as though we were strangers on the earth.
Human population is a critical element in thinking about a steady
state means of mutual provision. Populations can achieve steady
states where they are part of ecosystems (notice the similarity to
the word “economy”) which automatically cut down excess numbers.
“Unlimited
growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.”
Steady
states in biology are achieved by negative feed-back loops. It is
these loops which are lacking in financial systems dedicated to
growth; they are driven by positive feed-back loops which are
destructive rather than sustaining. In theory, markets should
experience sustaining negative feed-back loops; an overpriced product
won’t sell. And markets do have frequent fluctuations which look
much like a self regulating, self sustaining system. But the
fluctuations tend to rise higher than they fall giving a more or less
steadily rising trend over time. The economic engine just goes
faster and faster. This is caused by the belief in the necessity and
rightness of growth, which in turn is driven by greed.
At
a time of general financial collapse the people, through their
governments, have a rare occasion to shape business practices along
much more stable lines. Individuals have the opportunity to create
and support businesses which adopt steady-state methods. This is the
time to invent the economic equivalent of the steam engine governor.
Along with such technical fixes must go a widespread moral change
which values “enough” over “more.”
We
now have opportunity to let go of the nuts, recognize when we have
enough and embrace the discipline of feedback loops which mimic those
in nature.
“Never
does Nature say one thing and Wisdom another”.
Juvenal.
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