Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Dynamic Demand

A combination of freedom and technology has enabled more and more people to create their own “circuits,” significantly influencing the quality and quantity of resources available to everyone (and everything) else. In an electrical analog, the result would be a degradation of the entire system’s performance, and in our ecological system we are seeing similar consequences. These facts are behind my belief that to create an ideal world we must reorganize our societies so that everyone coordinates their behavior with that of everyone else, or at least follows the same standards of interaction with each other and the environment.

One way that grids of electrical power can help their generators and components (such as appliances) stay within their operating limits is to use “dynamic demand.” A similar approach to the management of resources throughout the world economy would require that each “load” (person) have and react appropriately to feedback about the status of the entire system, using the equivalent of “local load control.”

Capitalist systems theoretically use price as a way to monitor and control resource distribution by keeping the ratio of demand to supply of products and services relatively constant. Unfortunately, the correlation between what people buy and the resources used has been corrupted so much as to be almost indiscernible, except in the case of energy, which modulates everything.

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