What can we do, what should we do?
There is a black hole in climate research, ecological economics and Earth system models: The corporation. Of course, corporations are recognized as actors, but what happens inside the corporation is normally not included in the macro-scale perspective that most Earth sciences research in the broadest sense adopts. Even when critics claim that the ‘anthropocene’ should …
Continue reading "The modern corporation: centre of power in the technosphere"
In modern economics, information is arguably the core notion. Indeed, many economists would agree that the market is a giant distributed computer that processes information about scarcities of resources and generates prices that guide the actions of economic agents accordingly. However, economists rarely consider the physical side of information, although in practice that matters much, …
Continue reading "The technosphere as a computer: What are the thermodynamic implications?"
This week edition of The Economist has a very stimulating briefing on New York and the impact of the Corona. Cities are under immense pressure, as they are by definition and purpose places where people are densely packed and crowd together. The article cites an intriguing observation by the Santa Fé physicist Geoffrey West: The …
The Corona crisis has highlighted a problem of considerable significance for the study of co-evolutionary processes: temporal dynamics and temporal coordination. In my 2002 book (in German) ‘Elements of Evolutionary Economics’ I devoted a full chapter to time and introduced the term ‘Eigentime’ that is mostly known from physics but is rarely used in other …
Universal basic income UBI has been suggested by many authors as a major institutional innovation in designing the economy of the future. One motivation that increasingly gains acceptance is that it might be the solution to the problem of technological unemployment created by digitization and automation. In our context, that would translate into the assumption …
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Many observers have noticed that the current crisis could serve as a policy template for meeting the challenge of climate change. We collectively experience and manage a ‘de-growth’ process of unprecedented speed, and most governments are busy with finding ways how to recover growth. Yet, astute analysts such as the previous governor of the Bank …
Continue reading "The Corona, Oil and the Challenge of Climate Change"
Economic historians know well that pandemics and existential crises can change the evolutionary trajectory of economic systems. The most illustrious case was the Black Death that ushered the demise of feudalism via its impact on labour supply and wages. In the 20th century, the Great Depression and WWII fundamentally changed the role of government in …
A staple in debates over how we can counter the climate crisis is that we need to reduce our levels of consumption. Often, this appears to shift the brunt of the responsibility to the consumers aka citizens. But do we really consume too much? I have just completed reading this great achievement of historical scholarship, …
Most observers of the current climate crisis argue that we need fundamental changes of our lifestyles and economic policies. There is less emphasis on whether and how we must change the fundamental institutional structures of our economic systems. But when thinking about agency in the technosphere, institutions are central. If the technosphere follows its partly …
Continue reading "How to restore human agency in the technosphere"
Vaclav Smil is one of the world’s leading thinkers on energy, society and nature. He has just published a volume on growth across many scales and domains (“Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities”). As always, he presents an amazing richness of facts, often extremely enlightening. For example, he definitively shows that all thinking about ‘decoupling’ or …
Continue reading "Vaclav Smil on Growth: Seeing the Trees, but not the Forest"
