Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism
by Nate Hagens
Excerpted from Ecological Economics, Volume 169, March 2020
“We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”
Prologue:
Nate Hagens is a deep thinker in understanding the emergent Age of Limits. What follows is a digest of his longer article explaining the basic thermodynamics of our global predicament. Using a systems approach, Hagens examines the evolution of basic human behaviors, our ‘unlocking’ of fossilized resources and the explosion of growth they allowed. The function of debt as a social contract that accelerates growth, the role of growth as the requirement of our industrial model, and the terminal phase of that model in negative returns on increasing complexity, resource exhaustion and climate catastrophe. This is heavy reading and not for the faint of heart. Hagens offers no easy “problems” or “solutions.’ Only the necessary first step of understanding where we are.
– Orren P Whiddon.
Highlights
• We lack a cohesive map on how behavior, economy, and the environment interconnect.
• Global human society is functioning as an energy dissipating superorganism.
• Climate change is but one of many symptoms emergent from this growth dynamic.
• Culturally, this “Superorganism” doesn’t need to be the destiny of Homo sapiens.
• A systems economics can inform the ‘reconstruction’ after financial recalibration.
“Ecological Economics addresses the relationships between ecosystems and economic systems in the broadest sense.” – Robert Costanza
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.” – E.O. Wilson
“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” – Jean Baudrillard
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” – James Baldwin