…I’ve listened far enough to hear Indy do better (I think) than Kate Raworth on working towards the nub of a new economics. I might say more about that in due course, but it bothers me that ecology and metabolism have only really been in the discussion as passing mentions.

And part of the problem is my own fragile attention span in an attention-addled culture.

As it happens, this morning I listened to Nate Hagens’s latest Frankly and, I think, it does a couple of important things…

…
1. At 7 minutes or so, it’s short and direct and covers a lot of ground for the attention challenged.

2. Through analogy it provides a framework for the scaffolding of a new economics.

It does the second by highlighting how simple rules give rise to emergent complexity and we desperately need the kind of simplicity that can stand the test of emergence over time

youtu.be/h5VWZm7ESfk?si=sg-t_K…

The Superorganism Explained in 7 Minutes | Frankly 97

(Recorded May 26, 2025)In a world grappling with converging crises, we often look outward – for new tech, new markets, new distractions. But the deeper issue...

^YouTube

…So here are some excerpts from the transcript (PDF: static1.squarespace.com/static…) and my takeaway / invitation:

“The pursuit of energy and nature creates patterns A single Starling follows 3 simple rules. Stay close to your neighbor, but not too close, and move towards the center from these simple animal behaviors. A breathtaking shape, a murmuration appears in the sky, fluid, unpredictable, and alive. This is emergence in nature…

…“Emergence happens in the human world too. Billions of individuals, businesses, and nations each follow simple cultural rules. Seek profit, minimize cost, grow, all tethered to energy, materials and ecosystem impact the result. Global physical patterns. No one designed. No one intended, and few are planning around.”

What this prompts in me is the question:

What are the 3 simple rules that should underpin a new economics that can stand the test of time?

…Sidenote: I pasted the above excerpt exactly as is from the transcript. As I did so I noticed that the LLM-generated text has mistakes in it, and I’ve left them there deliberately.

Because they are artefacts of what I’ve started calling the *lack of care* economy.

The above mistakes would easily be fixed by a human editor but clearly none has intervened as yet. In this case, they’re not consequential. A competent reader can easily move past the random capitalisation and missing punctuation…

…but LLMs are the deliberate bypassing of care and we can be sure that that has dire consequences mastodon.social/@urlyman/11462…

Jonathan Schofield

2025-06-03 15:32:09

as @pluralistic says, the *lack of care* economy is intrinsic to:

“operating at scale without humans in the loop, to do tasks that historically we wouldn’t have tried to automate because they require human judgment”.

And the lack of care economy has already placed us in a very deep hole.

Quote below is from Indy Johar

mastodon.social/@urlyman/11461…

Jonathan Schofield (@urlyman@mastodon.social)

…“Real economy is coming at you whether you like it… or not. And it will come at us in every sense: soil, water, hydrological risk, everything you can imagine. And the final point I’d say is that the value of being human is massively diminished.

^Mastodon

…What I’m trying to get at is that we are evidence that what we might call ‘solutionism’ doesn’t work.

We need some simple rules at the heart of economics that, given the more than 3 billion years experiment that life has been running successfully, will never be wrong… at least until our sun phase shifts.

And if we examine the 3 simple rules that capitalism has put front and centre there is something badly, fatally wrong…

…In reverse of the order stated by Nate they are: grow, minimise cost, seek profit.

It’s been often noted that the only thing in nature that grows indefinitely is cancer, until it kills its host.

At face value, the other two seem well-aligned with natural processes: minimise cost, seek profit (a net surplus of power with which to do something).

But the fatal flaw is that for a few thousand years we’ve tied both those imperatives to arbitrary monetary tokens carrying close to zero information