Tag Archives: economy
Digression: “So Long As We Profit, Costs Elsewhere Aren’t Our Problem”?
A fault of flat earth economics as practiced in free enterprise economies is that it chops a nation’s economy into sections that are too often treated as being self-contained and independent of other sections. This is not a useful or realistic view. … Read more
Minerals in National Parks – Leave Them in the Ground?
The extraction of minerals often leads not just to the consumption and depletion of the mined material, but also to the unintended but unavoidable consumption and depletion of rich and necessary biological resources, which are quite wasted in the process. This happens when minerals are located in nature reserves and national parks. … Read more
Value Inflation – the Trigger, not the Bullet
The direct addition of value inflation to the rate of price increases is quite small. The larger effect arises from secondary influences, in whose shaping human psychology plays an important part. These influences are triggered by the small value inflation component and its corollary, a slowing of the rate of net throughput increase relative to gross throughput increase. … Read more
Digression: Pollution Red Herrings
Litter “Pollution”: A misleading idea, started when environmental awareness really took off world-wide in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s, is that “pollution” means “litter” and that preventing litter means doing all that’s necessary to prevent pollution and protect the environment. … Read more
The Derivatives of Wealth
The terms derivative and differential are used here in their mathematical sense, denoting rates of change.
Gross national product and living standard are treated as measures of quantity of wealth. In fact, they are not the quantity but its first derivative or first differential, the rate of wealth-throughput. … Read more
Notes on Evolution Not Revolution
First, it will be noted that things that common sense tells us are always good, such as efficient government or nuclear disarmament, or always bad, such as strikes or cartels, may actually be bed sometimes and good other times depending on the circumstances. … Read more
Ends and Means
Good Trends, Not Good Conditions
It is not the intention in this blog to establish a perfect world of perfect conditions. Such a thing has been imagined and described by many in the past, but it must always remain an abstract possibility in the indefinite future. … Read more
Foreword
When dealing with economics, we are confronted by a large array of interdependent static and dynamic variables. A change in one effects changes in all, which in turn affect the variable first changed, through its interdependence with the rest.
Cybernetics is perhaps most appropriate for the treatment of economic matters. … Read more
When the Boom comes
During the 1970′s and 1980′s governments and people generally in the more perfluent nations were waiting for an economic “upturn” or “recovery” to reduce what had become chronic high unemployment. The underlying assumption was that the high throughput-increase rates, the so-called “economic growth” rates of the 1950′s and 1960′s, were normal and that the more sluggish throughput-increase (TI) rates of latter years were an abnormal phenomenon that could be expected to speed up in time through this or that brilliant policy initiative or going back to the early economics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; or by eliminating (depending on your point of view) businessmen, unions, migrants, taxes, civil servants, or computers; or just by waiting. … Read more
Global Warming – A Red Herring?
The Australian Government has recently announced revised, reduced targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. There has been some objection to this but it should not really be surprising.
Governments around the world have shown that they just don’t get it. … Read more