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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 comparison seem too insulting to be taken seriously, in his defense I should mention that Krugman’s poor showing in this intellectual curiosity contest nevertheless illustrates an important dilemma. This dilemma is faced daily by parents trying to get to work, but also by the intellectual-activist attempting to harness a curious and inquiring disposition for useful action.
Here, at any rate, is a partially fictionalized conversation between me and my three year-olds. I should note, however, that it is less fictionalized than one might be apt to assume.
Daddy [putting boots on]: bye-bye guys
Evjen: Where you going daddy? Where you going?
Isak: No go bye-bye Daddy, no go bye-bye.
Daddy: I’m sorry men, I’d much rather stay here, but I have to go to work.
Evjen: Why Daddy?
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The Krugman Function Part 2–Whole System Thinking – Transition Milwaukee
The Krugman Function Part 2–Whole System Thinking – Transition Milwaukee.
Whole System Thinking
Anyone who has spent much time thinking about ecology, peak oil and the economy, or global carbon emissions with any degree of complexity understands the importance of whole-system thinking. Whole-system thinking reminds us that our economy cannot be intelligently assessed without an understanding of resources and energy. Whole-system thinking tells the ecologist that the loss of one species or a slight change in precipitation patterns will upset a far broader equilibrium whose boundaries are often impossible to predict. Whole-system thinking tries to remind the smug Prius driver that the embedded energy in the car’s battery-system may outweigh many of the gains in operating efficiency, or the gullible voter that lowering U.S. emissions by offshoring our heavy industry to China in our quest for a “knowledge economy” is of no practical import to global warming.
Whole-system thinkers are in constant conflict with a very strong tendency to see things in isolation or according to smaller isolated systems—like the economist who believes that the economic system has its own rules independent of geology and thermodynamics, the people who do not imagine how the loss of a bird or fish species might actually have any impact on them, and of course the smug Prius drivers who believe they have made “a difference” without bothering to follow the chains of cause and effect, flows and feedback, which would reveal what these differences are. Among the many lessons of whole-system thinking is the interconnected nature of everything and the inevitability of all sorts of unintended consequences, including many that are impossible to anticipate with any precision. Changing one thing on planet Earth, at any rate, changes many things—in some cases “everything.”
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