My
mathematical model
of population and consumption now has an economic
component that projects Gross World Product (GWP), global wealth,
and wealth distribution backward and forward in time. The latter was
aided by the lucky release of a
new report on global wealth.
As
people pursue happiness as defined in the model, they must seek and
manipulate sets of conditions (what I call "environments")
that maximize it. Economies are cultural tools for enabling this, so
it's not surprising that they can be described in the same terms.
One such term dominates this new view of economics: "happy
environment."
People
who have total life satisfaction occupy environments that are matched
to all of their needs and wants. Such matches are uncommon, just
like finding the perfect house. But if we could disassemble, move,
and assemble all the environments we collectively have access to
("inhabited environments") to make environments that match
as many people's wants and needs as possible, each of those
environments would be a happy environment.
Our
world economy doesn't explicitly traffic in happy environments (to my
knowledge, this is a concept that I just invented), but it appears to
do the equivalent. From what I can tell, it defines one set of happy
environments for actual, physical conditions. It defines another set
for all the ways those environments can be manipulated. Then it
defines a third set for all the ways the environments and
manipulations can be manipulated as abstract entities that embody
their value. Mathematically, economic activity (such as that
measured by GWP) is proportional to the square of the number of happy
environments; and wealth is proportional to the cube of the number of
happy environments.
One
of the most controversial issues facing people today is the
tremendous inequality in the distribution of wealth. If it was
distributed purely on the basis of happy environments, this wouldn't
be nearly as much of an issue as it is (though it certainly isn't
issue for the few people who benefit from it). However, as I
discovered while trying to find out how the model could reproduce the
actual distribution, our economy apparently uses both happy
environments and consumption to determine who has how much wealth,
dominated by the latter. Our exhaustion of sources of new
environments (and associated resources) has an already focusing
effect on wealth distribution, which I plan to elaborate upon
later, but this dependency on consumption makes it extreme.
Projections
of our economic future follow the same trajectories as happiness and
population, which are the factors that define the number of happy
environments. Thus, we are probably at the peak of everything, and
can expect it all to drop to zero by early in the next century (at
the latest). I'm continuing to explore the alternative "best"
case, which unrealistically relies on finding and using millions of
Earth-equivalent biospheres over the next 800 or so years, which is
what it would take to follow our preferred trajectory. If the
model's assumptions are accurate that far into the future, then we
will once again be at a peak, but it will be an ultimate one.
