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Tag Archives: complexity
Progress in an Uncertain World
Progress in an Uncertain World Strong Towns is often accused of offering doom-and-gloom diagnoses of problems but being light on solutions. “You don’t tell us what we can actually DO to fix our insolvent cities,” goes the response. “You’re just so negative all the time.” This is not true, but I also don’t think it’s […]
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 3
The Boundaries and Future of Solution Space – Part 3 Energy – Demand Collapse Followed by Supply Collapse As we have noted many times, energy is the master resource, and has been the primary driver of an expansion dating back to the beginning of the industrial revolution. In fossil fuels humanity discovered the ‘holy grail’ […]
Why is it So Hard for the West to See Everything is Connected?
Why is it So Hard for the West to See Everything is Connected? QUESTION: Marty, you have written many times how everything is connected and how in Asian culture that is the foundation of all understanding. Why is it so hard in the West to comprehend this fundamental concept? All the best GD ANSWER: I think it […]
How Economic Growth Fails
How Economic Growth Fails We all know generally how today’s economy works: Our economy is a networked system. I have illustrated it as being similar to a child’s building toy. Ever-larger structures can be built by adding more businesses and consumers, and by using resources of various kinds to produce an increasing quantity of goods and […]
The Gift of the Maya
The Gift of the Maya “The Maya forest garden holds, in its ramblings and roots, a hidden-in-plain-sight way through our present crises.” It takes a bit of time for the elegance of a food forest to emerge, something on the order of decades. Strolling the garden through the morning mist in a hot Tennessee summer, […]
Welcome to Blackswansville
Welcome to Blackswansville While the folks clogging the US tattoo parlors may not have noticed, things are beginning to look a little World War one-ish out there. Except the current blossoming world conflict is being fought not with massed troops and tanks but with interest rates and repayment schedules. Germany now dawdles in reply to […]
Kondratiev Goes Surfing
Kondratiev Goes Surfing “Excursions from the comfort of the normal to the uncertainty of the new typically happen brutally and violently.” We read recently in aSouthern California newspaper that climate change may wreck the shape and direction of waves that make for some of the world’s best surfing beaches. We wondered if it might have a […]
Keep It Simple And Complex, Stupid
Keep It Simple And Complex, Stupid My last post supporting the use of nonlinear models (“You Do Need A Weatherman”) generated some thoughtful responses, mainly along the lines of this post by Ari Andricopoulos entitled “A View on the Economic Model Debate from a Non-economist (but someone who builds models for a living)”. The basic argument is that […]
The Tyranny of Convenience
The Tyranny of Convenience Our lives are ridiculously convenient in this day and age, and much of the consumer economy seems to be directed at making life ‘easier’ still. It seems that the more convenient life becomes, the more need there is for more convenience. Anything is possible in this technological age and if it can’t be […]
The Inevitable Failure of Mechanistic Monetary Policy
The Inevitable Failure of Mechanistic Monetary Policy Our current faith in central banks’ ability to “make the economy all better, all the time” is horrendously misplaced. We are living in the Cargo Cult Era of Central Bankers. The era began in earnest on December 5, 1996, when Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan cautiously wondered aloud if […]
The Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: The Suicide of Science
The Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: The Suicide of Science. Last week’s discussion of facts and values was not as much of a diversion from the main theme of the current sequence of posts here on The Archdruid Report as it may have seemed. Every human society likes to think that its core cultural and intellectual projects, whatever […]
Energy & The Economy – Crash Course Chapter 22 | Peak Prosperity
Energy & The Economy – Crash Course Chapter 22 | Peak Prosperity. Chapter 22 of the Crash Course is now publicly available and ready for watching below. In the past few chapters on Energy Economics, Peak Cheap Oil, and the false promise of Shale Oil, we’ve gone into great detail to show how our economic growth is deeply […]
Complexity: The Hidden Cost of Central Bank Actions | Enterprising Investor
Complexity: The Hidden Cost of Central Bank Actions | Enterprising Investor. Central banks are printing rules almost as fast as they’re printing money. The consequences of these fast-multiplying directives — complicated, long-winded, and sometimes self-contradictory — is one topic at hand. Manipulated interest rates is a second. Distortion and mispricing of stocks, bonds, and currencies […]
The Infinite Toddler Regress–The Krugman Function Part 3 – Transition Milwaukee
The Infinite Toddler Regress–The Krugman Function Part 3 – Transition Milwaukee. In this installment I’m going to talk about Paul Krugman’s resistance to whole-system thinking, and I’m going to do it by way of a comparison to a very different intellectual dispensation: namely the one demonstrated by my three year old twin sons. Lest this […]
