## Metadata - Author: [[sciencedirect.com]] - Full Title: Economics for the Future – Beyond the Superorganism - Category: #articles - URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067 ## Highlights - Our brains require flows (feelings) that we satisfy today mostly using non-renewable stocks. - Unfortunately, most of our modern challenges are ‘in the future’. Recognition that the future exists and that we are part of it springs from a relatively new brain structure, the neocortex. It has no direct connection to deep-brain motivational centers that communicate urgency. When asked to plan a snack for next week between chocolate or fruit, people chose fruit 75% of the time. When choosing a snack for today, 70% select chocolate. When choosing a movie to watch next week 63% choose an educational documentary but when choosing a film for tonight 66% pick a comedy or sci-fi (Read et al., 1999). We have great intentions for the future, until the future becomes today. Our neocortex can imagine them, but we are emotionally blind to long-term issues like climate change or energy depletion. Emotionally, the future isn’t real. - Energy is and always will be the currency of life. The effectiveness of energy capture is central to biological systems. - Simple arithmetic reveals it takes over 11 years of human labor to do the same work potential in a barrel of oil. - Economists view capital, labor and human creativity as primary and energy secondary or absent. The opposite is, in fact, true. We are energy blind. - Using photosynthesis as a trickle charge, hundreds of millions of years of living biomass were stored as hydrocarbons in Earth’s battery. We are drawing down this carbon battery 10-million times faster than it was charged - We use around two calories of fossil fuel to grow one food calorie in our modern agricultural system – but we use 8–12 additional fossil calories to process, package, deliver, store and cook modern food - In the natural world, this is unsustainable. Organisms that require more energy to find food than the food contains, will die. - Society runs on energy and materials, but most people think it runs on money - Money is a claim on energy yet its creation is not tethered to energy availability or cost. - Since money is a claim on energy2, then debt is a claim on future energy. - Every single good and service in the global (or your own) economy started somewhere with a small fire. - The modern system has used finance to obfuscate the fact that we have consumed beyond our means for at least the past 50 years. The energy/credit/growth dynamic is the least understood but most important phenomenon driving the current global economic and ecological situation. - Finally, just as we discovered that we live in a heliocentric world, and that we evolved, we now begin to see that we are part of a biologically emergent Superorganism which is de-facto eating the planet. If we figure that out, what new pathways might it open up? - A bunch of mildly clever, highly social apes broke into a cookie jar of fossil energy and have been throwing a party for the past 150 years. The conditions at the party are incompatible with the biophysical realities of the planet. The party is about over and when morning comes, radical changes to our way of living will be imposed. Some of the apes must sober up (before morning) and create a plan that the rest of the party-goers will agree to. But mildly clever, highly social apes neither easily nor voluntarily make radical changes to their ways of living. And so coffee and stimulants (credit, etc.) will be consumed during another lavish breakfast, but with the shades drawn. It’s morning already.