The Economic Implications of The Maximum Power Principle For a Sustainable Society 2016, delivered at a BioPhysical Economics conference. I've looked this over several times.
One slide starts, "AND MY POINT IN ALL OF THIS? " and continues--
• Our global economic system is NOT REMOTELY CLOSE TO SUSTAINABLE.
• We are captured and being dragged along by a complex, powerful and remorseless dynamic that automatically thwarts all attempts to stop it.
• If we don’t put time and energy into understanding it, we are doomed to go with it, right to the final curtain.
As E.A Poe envisioned: "The curtain, a funeral pall, Comes down with the rush of a storm, And the angels, all pallid and wan, Uprising, unveiling, affirm That the play is the tragedy, 'Man', And its hero, the Conqueror Worm." The Conqueror Worm, as ideologically driven Demagogue to Come, is poet-speak for a "complex, powerful and remorseless dynamic that automatically thwarts all attempts to stop it." e.g. the current global SYSTEM that selects for growth—our little "play of hopes and fears."
The above basically sums up my concerns, and I see the dynamics in much the same terms as Boyle and Poe. I seem to recall reading as a youth that Spinoza could pretty much be summed up by "to understand something is to be delivered from it." So where 'deliverance' seems appropriate, issues need to be understood and the process of understanding leads to some sense of what might actually work.
Systems self-organize to maximize power and systems self-organize into hierarchies of energy exchange and feedback to maximize empower. This is the substance of 'natural selection', but any definition of the fourth proposed law of energetics (or thermodynamics), I wish to quibble, needs to refer to selection within sustainable systems. Some systems that maximize power are selected against in the long-run; the obvious example would be cancer. A metastasizing cancer prospers greatly by consuming surrounding tissue, but only for a time. Cancerous growth is selected for, quite strongly at times. My dad developed lung cancer that metastasized elsewhere and was dead in little more than a month. So cancer is doing the MPP thing, perhaps vigorously, but is selected against as it consumes its host and passes away with its host. From the cancer's POV everything looks great up to and including while in the ICU. It looks like all the life-support provided, the IVs, intubation, nursing care.... is to enable continued growth. The universe loves growth, it seems (to the growthers lacking foresight). Even when the cascade of multiple system failures sets in, there is plenty of tissue left to exploit, to enable continued growth. Yet within a few hours all cells, including the cancerous, are dead if not turned to clay. It is clear that carcinomas lack 'foresight intelligence', or as Garrett Hardin would say, fail to ask, "And then what?" Cancer merely maximizes short-term pay-offs, in its determined pursuit of self interest, not unlike those humans who prosper most during economic growth which selects for such people.
For some reason, the equally obvious other example is not at all obvious to those who should be concerned, those prospering exceeding during the current exuberance of techno-industrial growth, e.g. the NCE cheerleaders beating the growth drum or the loyal "opposition" who sing sweetly of "sustainability".. I'm thinking those behind MAHB at Stanford who identify the lack of foresight intelligence as enabling or pointing to what could be corrective if developed among planners and policy makers (politicians don't count as their jobs need to go away). Even if some humans are capable of developing sufficient foresight intelligence, the current system doesn't select for it as those developing it fail to enthusiastically serve the cancerous system. As Edward Abbey observed, 'endless growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. "For normal cells, their ideology is that 'we are the body". For us it should be "we are the environment" instead of "growth is good; the more growth the better; in growth we trust". To growthers, degrowth will come as a shocker. We-are-the-enivronment humans will wonder how rapid the managed degrowth in population and the consumer enonmy can be, quicker being better, without collapsing complex society. The new OS of society needs to select for foresight intelligence.
So, the Maximum Power Principle states that “in the competition among self-organizing processes, network designs that maximize empower will prevail” (Odum, 1996). “Because designs with greater performance prevail, self-organization selects network connections that feed back transformed energy to increase inflow of resources or to use them more efficiently” (Odum, 2000). Biological systems selection over geological time selects for self-organizing designs that co-evolve with dependent subsystems. Hence a predator, with one obligate prey, that develops, via mutation, an ability to always find and consume the prey at will, will grow and 'prosper' to eliminate the prey and itself assuming the prey has no defense to select for. So 'evolution' is short for co-evolution in a sustainable system.
I took an interest in The Game of Trust or The Evolution of Trust, which is a form of modeling, https://ncase.me/trust/
I spent quite a few quality hours playing the game and twiddling the parameters, which ended up with me writing another article: http://www.sustainable.soltechdesigns.com/copykitten.html
At any rate, if you have any corrections to offer, I'm known as Eric Often-wrong Lee for good reason.
Watch as video:
"The higher and faster you grow, the further and faster you fall, when you're building up capital stock in a nonrenewable resource. In the face of exponential growth of extraction or use, a doubling or quadrupling of the nonrenewable resource give little added time to develop alternatives.... The real choice in the management of a nonrenewable resource is whether to get rich very fast or to get less rich but stay that way longer." —Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems [The current SYSTEM always selects for short-termism, a remorseless dynamic we are all trapped in.]