Economies in nature.

AuthorHenshaw, Philip F.
PositionFROM READERS - Letter to the editor

There are always big gaps in human designs for things nature makes appear easy, but are not. The "economic democracy" idea proposed by David Schweickart ["A New Capitalism--or a New World?", September/October] is interesting for the ideals expressed, but retains one of the central flaws of capitalism that has to be dealt with for human economies to ever become part of nature. Schweickart is in very good company, as the same flaw mars nearly all the popular alternate economic models.

What's missing is a correction for how private, institutional, and government money management is used to drive an endless, growing search for new ways to use up the Earth. I think they all did in fact consider it, but apparently didn't see the natural way to solve it. It's the central problem of capitalism: the conflict between stability and the rules that let owners of money continually multiply their money, even in a non-growing economy. If people agree there's a need to limit the growth of wealth, can you still have unlimited growth of ownership and money?

There's an elegant certainty that points to a true solution. It was first discovered by J.M. Keynes, studied further by Kenneth Boulding, and then used by me to point to the riddle of how natural-system economies take good care of themselves. Perhaps those who read Chapter 16' in Keynes' General Theory or Boulding's last chapter in A Reconstruction of Economics, or my papers, were embarrassed to not understand the issue or hesitant to confront the intriguing moral quandaries it raises. The financial problem of economic climax comes down to a simple choice: either a) investment stops growing because conditions get so bad that returns on investments don't materialize, or b) healthy returns earned by investments are recycled as spending, instead of being used to accumulate until (a) occurs.

Natural-system economies have parts that exchange complementary goods and services, creating their own organization as they develop by growth. They sometimes switch off their systematic growth mechanisms and stabilize at their peak of vitality instead of taking it to some peak of exhaustion. We could study that to help understand our problem with the same issue.

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Our own bodies are collectively run market organizations of cells, exchanging complementary services through the blood stream and nerve system networks. A freshwater pond ecology links various populations of organisms that create their own...

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