I suggested that a basic difference is that ecologies are supply driven whereas economies are demand driven.
[Fabio] Hi Russ
I wonder whether this statement refers to economies in general or specifically to capitalism; not all economic systems humans have devised are demand-driven. Many claim that capitalism would not exist without advertisement, which questions how ‘natural’ demand is as a driver.
In my view, the difference between ecology and economics lies in the constraints; in the ecology these are biophysical, in the economy they seem to be much closer to human imagination and creativity (for example, many people buy and sell literally nothing). Many would claim that it is exactly this mismatch in constraints which will lead us to doom.
Fabio
For the most part, ecologies are food chains. Organisms live or not depending on whether they have enough to eat.
Economies in contrast are demand driven. We are currently in an economic slump (perhaps you aren't) because there isn't enough demand. Most people (but not all) depend on demand to enable them to get the resources they need to survive. For the most part that seems not to be true in ecologies. (I know there are examples of where an organism depends on demand. The bacteria example in the post you read is an example.) Most organisms in ecologies depend primarily on the existence of resources, not demand for their services.
Also, I'm not talking about long term effects like corrals. Just more or less steady state systems. This was all prompted by my puzzling about the nature of our economic system. There was once a joke about California that there really isn't any productive industry here. We all just take in each other's laundry to make a living. In some sense there is probably more truth to that than it seems. Most of us do depend on someone else wanting our services.
So that's the background to the post you read. I'm always interested in your comments.
-- Russ
On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 9:11 PM, <[hidden email]> wrote:
G'day,
If I'm understanding your premise here I'm not sure I agree.
First flippantly Fabio Boschetti is currently sitting here with me and as he pointed out, if you just look at advertising you'd be hard pressed to get beyond pairing and consuming as the selling tools ;)
More seriously people do things to "get by" and increase their "security" whether that's economic security, food security, recreational security or ecosystem service security. All still comes down to "living" or the "future" (i.e. feeding or pairing in effect). There are plenty of unintended consequences of the day-to-day activities that go on to have indirect products others use, but the same is true of ecological communities too - corals don't build skeletons because that will make a complex 3D habitat that acts as infrastructure for reef fish, but that's the way it works out.
After 20 years of ecosystem and now socio-econ-ecological system modelling/study I really can't say I see a dichotomy in the fundamental structural pattens across the different components. I do see that economic systems don't feel their constraints until they are closer to a hysteresis point, while ecological systems typically feel constraints more quickly, but functionally there are many many parallels between the two, which is why so many of the tools are being simultaneously applied to both fields now (input/output, loop analysis, ABMs etc).
Cheers
Beth
________________________________________
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott [[hidden email]]
Sent: Tuesday, 19 October 2010 10:19 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; Alexandre Lomovtsev; Porter, Edith; Matthew Berryman; Grisogono, Anne-Marie (Anemarija Degris); Shuger, Debora; Weber, Bob; causality_in_complex_systems
Subject: [Causality in Complex Systems] Re: [FRIAM] Economy vs. ecology, er
I think that Jochen is right to look at what is being produced. It's a fairly commonplace observation by now that living organisms reduce entropy locally. Someone who is fairly well know wrote as part of a fairly large book (and I can't remember either the author or the book; it's perhaps 5 years old) that a good way to decide when something is productive is to see whether it results in a local decrease in entropy. Most "consumption" is not productive in that sense; most "work" is. "Recreation" can be either.
Living organisms, as Jochen said, "produce" themselves. They also produce other things. Birds build nests. Beavers build dams. Spiders build webs. Most organisms build some sort of home for themselves. All social organisms build social networks of various sorts. So it's not just that organisms build nothing but themselves.
We, in our advanced economy have become dependent on building things other than ourselves. That seems to be one of the primary differences. Even though other organisms build other things, for the most part they spend most of their energy building themselves -- and their offspring. Also, the things they build are generally built for themselves -- or at least their social group. Most of us spend most(?) of our energy building things other than ourselves. And they are things that we don't use directly, and often not indirectly. (Although since they are produced for the economy, and we are part of the economy, perhaps that's not strictly true.) Not only that, we depend on a demand for the things we build (and I'm using "build" very broadly to refer to any kind of paid work) to supply us with the means to get the resources necessary to build ourselves, i.e., to buy food. Other organisms don't depend on demand to supply their resources.
Symbiotic species combinations make this even more difficult to analyze. What about the bacteria in our gut, for example? They depend on the demand we make of them to help us digest food. And we pay them with nutrients. Without the demand for their services, e.g., if we die, so do they.
I think this is a direction worth pursuing. Sorry if this post has been somewhat ragged. There are a lot of pieces that should be disentangled.
-- Russ Abbott
______________________________________
Professor, Computer Science
California State University, Los Angeles
Google voice: 424-242-USA0 (last character is zero)
blog: http://russabbott.blogspot.com/
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On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]<mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
Tory is right, ecologic systems and especially
their inhabitants, the living organisms, look
more complex than companies or corporations.
What I meant was that there seem to be a
fundamental difference in the input-output
relations.
The output of agents in economic systems is
a product made from the inputs during the
business process. In ecologic systems this is
only comparable to the cognitive part of
organisms, where perceptions are processed to
produce an action. In the "food web" there is
nothing produced except the organisms themselves.
Whenever there is something interesting happening
in nature, it is either supper time or pairing
time. The former is used to sustain the body,
the latter to sustain the species. This is
different from economies, isn't it?
-J.
----- Original Message ----- From: Eric Smith
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Economy vs. ecology, er
The acts that organisms take, merely in the course of living from one day to the next, tend to be under-emphasized in relation to the acts of reproducing. But the input-output relations of ecology should correspond fairly nicely to the input-output relations of the economy, if either were a well-formed technical theory. In economics, input-output goes under the names Leontief I/O theory, or closely related von Neumann-Gale growth theory. I have often wished that either had more of the strictness of chemical input/output relations -- at least where such are warranted -- but that is not yet the case, as both fields have been more interested in the flexibility afforded by innovation than in the constraints that limit the landscape.
In terms of what organisms do to each other, whether intentionally or inadvertently, there are the two names "Niche Construction" and "ecosystem engineering". The first has a book by Laland, Odling-Smee, and Feldman. It's a big area, and the book only opens the topic, but it's a start. Many of the ideas are general enough that they are equally comfortable in the economy, which is, as you say, part of the global ecosystem.
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