Social Cohesiveness

The differences in experiences between people in a group can provide some insight into the cohesiveness of the group as a society, which recently has appeared to be decreasing. Action phases provide a measure of those differences, which correspond to different ranges of global variables that can be loosely associated with roles and experiences in the manipulation and distribution of resources throughout the population. The total range of phases has tended to expand throughout history, as shown below for the simulation “Green.” 

If the world of this simulation as a whole was experienced by a single person, that person would follow the World phase trajectory in the graphs. This is considerably different from the average person (the green line marking the 50% trajectory) and the person with the highest phase (the red line). Those people in the 10% with the lowest phases are the most different from the rest of the population, now occupying five of the seven phases where people can be found.

Global variables projected for the end of this month are shown below for the range of phases as it will exist then. The obvious phases people would want to occupy are 4 and 6 based on life expectancy and happiness, but the expansion of the range of phases caused by the reduction of unconsumed resources is forcing everyone higher - toward the dropping population that follows a maximum phase of 8 and a world phase of 6. The graph shows half the population above phase 7, with no happiness or life expectancy (for children born in that group), which will surely be a major event for the simulated world it inhabits.

To the extent that the simulation coincides with our real world on which it is historically based, the changes in life expectancy and population growth will be observable here on a global scale, although individual nations will vary based on their resources, consumption, and interactions with each other. 

With so much at stake, it would be unsurprising see social fragmentation of the population into three groups: the one-sixth of the population that benefits from increasing consumption; the half that is being driven toward death; and the remaining one-third that is suffering catastrophic loss of happiness and life expectancy. Such fragmentation would have a strong economic component, since the one-sixth that wants more consumption owns four-fifths of the world’s wealth, and that wealth tends to increase with consumption.

Spaceship Finance

In its simplest form, personal financial planning is governed by one inescapable requirement: Total income over remaining lifetime must be greater than or equal to expenses over remaining lifetime. If you're lucky, "remaining lifetime" is the sum of working years and retirement years, where you are not physically working during retirement.

In practice, planning gets complicated by the many forms of income and expense, but even they can be simplified when you realize that there are basically only two types of each: constant and exponential. The exponential types, in particular, can get pretty tricky, since they depend on the ability to accelerate growth of money without limits, and that money can represent both physical things and non-physical things. As the constant types have been increasingly linked to the exponential types (for example, your "constant" salary is likely paid by an employer who relies on exponential growth in profits), they too have become harder to plan for.

Now that we face hard limits to the availability of quality ecological resources, upon which our economy and our physical survival is based, basic assumptions built into our economy are beginning to lose their usefulness, which is making successful planning by most individuals and many organizations even more difficult. In addition to reducing room for growth, which has been assumed to be infinite, we are degrading the ability of social and physical ecosystems to absorb or nullify the negative effects of our actions within a period of time that is meaningful to people. This results in decreasing exponential income and increasing exponential expense, as an average, for our whole population, which reduces our effective lifetime.

One positive aspect of our situation is that we are collectively becoming a global village, re-creating some important dynamics of near-isolated communities of the past. In an idealized version of such a community, the social and environmental impacts of economic activity were felt directly by both businesses and their customers. Since the number of prospective customers was practically limited, businesses had to focus on keeping them satisfied; and since resources were limited, their consumption had to be kept below the regeneration rate (such as the growth of new trees for wood) if the business along with the community was to survive over a long period of time. Businesses were rewarded with enough profit to create new products or services only if they could find more resources or efficiencies in the use of existing resources, and if it didn't result in harming the community. Exponential growth became possible as a community's territory expanded and its population grew to take advantage of the newly available resources. Combining of multiple communities also contributed to that growth, leading to our present situation. Enabled by multiple technologies that have also grown exponentially, we have turned much of our planet-sized spaceship into a giant community of communities, subject to rules of survival similar to the ones those early communities had to live with, but without most of the self-replenishing resources they had.

Our new community and the environment it occupies is much more complex than the ones we were naturally evolved to maintain, which is a big reason for our heavy dependence on technology. Our computers and communications enable us to share and mentally process experiences around our community, translating its complexity into much simpler forms we can comprehend, thus keeping us from being aware of all but the largest of the consequences of our actions, and, even then, not with the gut-level feedback we naturally depend upon for knowing and acting to change the status of our environment. Put another way: We have taken over Spaceship Earth by cannibalizing its parts for our pleasure and thereby sabotaging its life support systems, while knowing a lot about the small part we were supposed to operate before we went rogue, and knowing very little about the rest of it.

One thing we do know is that life tends to maintain habitability for itself, and there is still a chance that species we haven't destroyed could fix enough of the damage we've inflicted to keep our planet habitable (if still uncomfortable) for at least a few decades more than if we don't let them. To give them that chance, we will need to let them have more resources. From a personal finance point of view, I estimate will all need to learn to limit our individual expenses to under $12,000 per year, which, not surprisingly, is most easily done by reinforcing the necessary regrowth of natural ecosystems and their denizens so they can provide more replenishing resources like what we evolved to consume (of which we should use less than half). This should also help reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, one of our largest negative impacts on ecosystems both directly and indirectly (through climate change).

Ideally, the world community would eventually function like an isolated sustainable community, utilizing exponential income and expense only as necessary to deal with conditions that require swift growth or contraction to maintain survivability, instead of an ongoing expectation for personal gain. For most of us, our life focus would shift to favoring quality over quantity. The inevitable fraction of the population that found this impossible to live with would have the option, like generations of the past, to explore new environments – this time in space – and make them habitable for people, so long as those efforts did not degrade the lives of existing communities.

Requirements For Another Ideal World

In "Money and Responsibility" I mentioned my latest vision of an ideal world, whose focus is on preserving and proliferating life, especially ours, through commonly held values, understanding, and management of resources. It can be described, with some refinement, by a set of requirements that would apply wherever humans are (on Earth and in space):

• V: All of us agree to a common set of basic values and standards for developing them
  • The main value, which dominates all others, is the preservation and proliferation of life for as long as physically possible
• U: All of us agree to a common understanding of reality and standards for developing it
  • That understanding will be based on observation, logic, and verifiable predictions
• M: None of us can take, or render useless, the means of basic survival ("the commons") used by anyone else, including members of other species critical to maintaining those means, beyond the constraints of natural predator-prey relationships
• E: Everything not in the commons may be distributed among people in a socially acceptable way, such as in an economy
  • This includes rewards for risks incurred in expanding the commons, which may be kept for a fixed time (not to exceed one lifetime)
• R: We are all responsible for maintaining the commons

For convenience, I'll refer to these requirements by the acronym VUMER, and its implementation "VUMER World." The main value is the driver for all of the requirements; and an accurate and commonly-held understanding of reality is critical for taking appropriate and effective action in implementing values, especially those involving survival, and well as maintaining a cohesive society. Values "V" and understanding "U" therefore take precedence over the other requirements, which deal with implementation.

It is of course possible that an actual global agreement about values and understanding (which itself is pretty "ideal," and would involve everyone, rather than just officials of dominant political entities) would preclude my preferences for them and everything that follows from them. I wouldn't be surprised if such an outcome represents a compromise between VUMER World and the "Dead World" we are currently creating, which might delay our demise by a few more years, but at least we would all be invested in the outcome rather than, as many of us are, going along for the ride.

The End of Hope

Sometime this week, my hope ran out for the survival of civilization, with little left that our eager decimation of the biosphere will not result in our own extinction. While the prospects for our recovery have been getting progressively worse for years, a combination of news stories crossed some kind of threshold in my mind which made it feel like it's all but impossible.

Two of the most recent had to do with climate feedback mechanisms that all but assure that global warming will get much worse. Arctic ice is at an historic minimum and will likely disappear soon, leading to increased warming because sunlight will no longer be reflected by the ice. There is good reason to believe that a modest amount of additional warming may result in the widespread melting of methane-laden permafrost that could spike temperatures over the edge of survivability.

The big news of the week was, of course, the "sequester," one of several attempts by radical government-haters to open the door to unrestrained pillage of nature and society; it will cut back on many of the means we currently have for limiting and adapting to environmental damage. The scale of that environmental damage includes, of course, more than climate change: recent research shows that wild bees are more critical to our food supply than honeybees, and being wiped out by the top mechanism of extinction, habitat loss.

And it just keeps getting worse. At the end of the week, the U.S. State Department issued its report on the environmental impact of the infamous Keystone XL Pipeline, giving the project a clean bill of health despite evidence that the use of tar sands oil will considerably increase climate warming carbon emissions.

I recalled something I learned a few years ago about what is perhaps the key driver of business operation, pursuit of profit. Profit must continuously increase, preferably at an exponential rate, for a business to be considered successful. There are several ways to do so: add value to what you produce, increase demand for what you're already making, and reduce costs. The first two approaches increase consumption if the business can provide supply to meet demand, which is bad enough in a resource-constrained world. The last approach, however, is the most damaging when applied exponentially, because there is always a minimum cost required – you can't get something for nothing – and if you're "successful," you are likely just good at forcing someone else to eat that cost. Many of the mechanisms directly causing unhealthy income and social inequality in this country and elsewhere may be directly tied to the application of this approach, but it has even more far-ranging effects. Because business is the most powerful human enterprise, society and the planet's other species are effectively being forced to give more than they can afford and still survive. We are all dying as a result. 

Trust

We all have limited experience and knowledge, but this doesn't keep us from having to make decisions about things we are personally next to clueless about, or powerless to directly affect. For such decisions, we often depend on others we trust, who appear to have relevant knowledge, abilities, and experience that we don't. That trust tends to be based on our assessment of how much those others would agree with us on things we do know about. Conversely, the more different someone is from us, the less likely we are to trust them to do anything, especially if the potential cost of letting them is especially high. This dynamic applies to a wide range of situations, including who we vote for (in a representative democracy), what we buy at a store, and who is guilty in a court trial.

Trust also depends on our shared values. In my personal value system, a “good” decision is one that maximizes satisfaction and health for everyone who will be affected by the actions taken in its aftermath, with priority placed on the latter. Some would argue that it is they who should experience maximum satisfaction, and it doesn't matter what happens to anyone else as a result (they might even consider the diminishing of other people's health as a source of satisfaction). Others might quibble that “satisfaction” includes “health”; I've included both to ensure that health is taken into account regardless of the immediate goals of the decision.

As our experience builds with those we trust, we will either gain or lose confidence in them, and will either limit or expand their role in future decisions. Sometimes, however, we have no choice, such as when children must trust their parents or guardians to keep them safe. In such cases, the trust is often backed up by a society that imposes strict penalties for abusing it.

Our societies and their institutions are also held to standards of trust, by the citizens who are part of them, and dependent on them for what they can't do themselves. For example, the economic crisis that started in 2008 was precipitated by the abuse of trust by banks and their insurers. The U.S. government – as an agent of society – was entrusted with keeping them honest and their customers safe from fraud; yet that trust too was abused, and to date neither the institutions nor the government have taken adequate steps to ensure that they can be trusted about such things in the future (though people still depend on them, largely because they have little choice).

This brings up the question: What can people do if they have no one to trust when they are lacking what it takes to meet their needs on their own? Under such conditions, they may begin to form new associations, or even new communities, that are more trustworthy. The alternatives may even coexist with the original, untrustworthy ones until either trust is restored in the originals, or the originals lose all their power because no one trusts them any more. If no alternatives exist or can be constructed, then tragedy may result: slowly, if the originals still have some capability to meet people's needs; or quickly, if they have already fallen (the political variant of the latter is anarchy, where it's literally “every man for himself”).