You ask, "Does the presence of energy surplus create the exosomatic economic social organization, or does the social organization create the incentives and the discovery and the methods to access more energy?" You guess the former.
I conjecture that both are true, existing in a positive (reinforcing) feedback loop. If that is so, then the "burning" question (pun intended) is where to find a leverage point to either break one of those flows or to convert it into a balancing loop.
Sounds about right. First up, agrarian-based civilisation seems to have surplus 'social energy' and builds 'monuments'? 'Cities' 'efficiently' provide a materials craft-base for semi-subsistent villages; e.g. old China? And, at least potentially, administer an 'insurance' food storage facility to support uneven food production and storage? Actual ratios of 'cities' to food-growing base is limited by degree of food surplus, unless cities get into bulk trading? Noted from Nate / Geoff that 'crime' and other pathologies also grow with size? (Cambridge Uni UK has population studies of London in the 17thC / 18thC where innovative 'vibes' and growing trading footprint drew (forced?) immigrants who maintained pop. growth against a ferocious death rate for children that precluded in situ renewal.)
And then there is war and its logistics?
I am still thinking about a history of intellectual understanding that led to the possibility of mechanising intelligent action, eventually a digital world. See plausible account in book by Jeremy Naydler.
I've ordered Geoffrey West's book. I want to see more depth on how he came up with his economies of scale. GDP is such an arbitrary measure. I don't know if different countries measure GDP the same way. In the US, GDP includes response to negative externalities, such as crime fighting and superfund site cleanup. If you excluded those from GDP, the GDP economy of scale would look even more efficient.
On the other hand, it seems to me that you should subtract the costs of the externalities from that net GDP that excluded them, at which point the efficiency would decrease, perhaps becoming vanishingly small.
In any case, urban size is limited by the energy needed to supply it with food, water, etc. and to remove and treat waste, which means that when the carbon pulse ends, cities will be forced to shrink, efficiency be damned.
The two books, Resilience Thinking and Resilience Practice by Brian Walker & David Salt, show the trade-off between efficiency and resilience in stark contrast. Our global urbanized society has clearly entered the late conservation phase of the adaptive cycle, yet has found ways to iterate back to rapid growth over and over by fracking, QE, and obfuscated number reporting - Geoffrey West's innovation acceleration treadmill - but sooner or later, something will miss a step and get hucked over backwards off the back of the treadmill, and there will be a lot of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
Robin, sorry this is very long - my apologies and to our host. I for one will value your comments on West's book! Thinking as you suggest about growth of negativities in cities … these attracted innovation, both social and material. London eventually became sanitary in the 19thC; it was done with brick sewers (still in use), iron pipes and Public Health and innovation of such as microbiology and safer immunisation and plenty of water. They could afford it; they could not afford not to. Meanwhile the temperate grasslands of the Americas and elsewhere opened up with rails and coal, and in-came the grains. On the ground we got a police force and their little modular street fortifications standardised across London and other cities often by then of a million or more. (Symbolically represented by the modest box on TV’s Dr Who?)
We take cities and suburbs for granted. Although the US almost exclusively has used the motor car and found a use for all that spare gasoline, in the UK the suburbs until recently were in effect served by rail networks. Elsewhere in the world large populations live in the still partly-traditional agrarian hinterlands; for example in China and India. A problem for their governments is not to go too fast and rapidly pauperise a billion or more by undermining the value of their livelihood and further force migration to the urban? We witness this happening, both successes and failures in real time. Note FWIW – industrialisation globally has only urbanised just over half the population so far. Is this an unfinished project already hitting severe limits?
Nate has his latest conversation with Michael Every. Michael is in the thick of it with analyst teams for a Dutch bank based in Thailand (?). I found it pretty eerie as he ran the scenarios - a 'civilisation' hanging onto 'growth' and the feedback of 'efficiency' at all costs. I hope it helps if I paste an extract from an expert history of the 'Great Plains' that illustrates a point or two about limits.
This has been a key reference book for me.
"They applied manure as it was available, rotated legumes when it was convenient. But they had no strategy for the very long term. By the 1930s, Rooks County fields had been planted, cultivated, and harvested sixty times without rest. Soil nitrogen was about half what it had been at sod-breaking and crop yields declined steadily. And now no western frontier remained. From the vantage of 1930s, crop agriculture in Kansas does not appear very sustainable. All the arable land in Rooks County - and in the nation for that matter – had been identified and plowed. Soil nitrogen and organic carbon drifted steadily downward, and with them yields and profits. Faced with this dilemma, farmers implemented a dramatic innovation in soil nutrient management. Rather than adopt one or more of the ancient strategies, farmers (and the industrial nation behind them) created a new option. They appropriated abundant cheap fossil-fuel energy to import enormous amounts of synthetically manufactured nitrogen onto their fields. …”
page 219, ‘On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment’, Cunfer 2005; preview in googlebooks
You ask, "Does the presence of energy surplus create the exosomatic economic social organization, or does the social organization create the incentives and the discovery and the methods to access more energy?" You guess the former.
I conjecture that both are true, existing in a positive (reinforcing) feedback loop. If that is so, then the "burning" question (pun intended) is where to find a leverage point to either break one of those flows or to convert it into a balancing loop.
Sounds about right. First up, agrarian-based civilisation seems to have surplus 'social energy' and builds 'monuments'? 'Cities' 'efficiently' provide a materials craft-base for semi-subsistent villages; e.g. old China? And, at least potentially, administer an 'insurance' food storage facility to support uneven food production and storage? Actual ratios of 'cities' to food-growing base is limited by degree of food surplus, unless cities get into bulk trading? Noted from Nate / Geoff that 'crime' and other pathologies also grow with size? (Cambridge Uni UK has population studies of London in the 17thC / 18thC where innovative 'vibes' and growing trading footprint drew (forced?) immigrants who maintained pop. growth against a ferocious death rate for children that precluded in situ renewal.)
And then there is war and its logistics?
I am still thinking about a history of intellectual understanding that led to the possibility of mechanising intelligent action, eventually a digital world. See plausible account in book by Jeremy Naydler.
I've ordered Geoffrey West's book. I want to see more depth on how he came up with his economies of scale. GDP is such an arbitrary measure. I don't know if different countries measure GDP the same way. In the US, GDP includes response to negative externalities, such as crime fighting and superfund site cleanup. If you excluded those from GDP, the GDP economy of scale would look even more efficient.
On the other hand, it seems to me that you should subtract the costs of the externalities from that net GDP that excluded them, at which point the efficiency would decrease, perhaps becoming vanishingly small.
In any case, urban size is limited by the energy needed to supply it with food, water, etc. and to remove and treat waste, which means that when the carbon pulse ends, cities will be forced to shrink, efficiency be damned.
The two books, Resilience Thinking and Resilience Practice by Brian Walker & David Salt, show the trade-off between efficiency and resilience in stark contrast. Our global urbanized society has clearly entered the late conservation phase of the adaptive cycle, yet has found ways to iterate back to rapid growth over and over by fracking, QE, and obfuscated number reporting - Geoffrey West's innovation acceleration treadmill - but sooner or later, something will miss a step and get hucked over backwards off the back of the treadmill, and there will be a lot of weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
Robin, sorry this is very long - my apologies and to our host. I for one will value your comments on West's book! Thinking as you suggest about growth of negativities in cities … these attracted innovation, both social and material. London eventually became sanitary in the 19thC; it was done with brick sewers (still in use), iron pipes and Public Health and innovation of such as microbiology and safer immunisation and plenty of water. They could afford it; they could not afford not to. Meanwhile the temperate grasslands of the Americas and elsewhere opened up with rails and coal, and in-came the grains. On the ground we got a police force and their little modular street fortifications standardised across London and other cities often by then of a million or more. (Symbolically represented by the modest box on TV’s Dr Who?)
We take cities and suburbs for granted. Although the US almost exclusively has used the motor car and found a use for all that spare gasoline, in the UK the suburbs until recently were in effect served by rail networks. Elsewhere in the world large populations live in the still partly-traditional agrarian hinterlands; for example in China and India. A problem for their governments is not to go too fast and rapidly pauperise a billion or more by undermining the value of their livelihood and further force migration to the urban? We witness this happening, both successes and failures in real time. Note FWIW – industrialisation globally has only urbanised just over half the population so far. Is this an unfinished project already hitting severe limits?
Nate has his latest conversation with Michael Every. Michael is in the thick of it with analyst teams for a Dutch bank based in Thailand (?). I found it pretty eerie as he ran the scenarios - a 'civilisation' hanging onto 'growth' and the feedback of 'efficiency' at all costs. I hope it helps if I paste an extract from an expert history of the 'Great Plains' that illustrates a point or two about limits.
This has been a key reference book for me.
"They applied manure as it was available, rotated legumes when it was convenient. But they had no strategy for the very long term. By the 1930s, Rooks County fields had been planted, cultivated, and harvested sixty times without rest. Soil nitrogen was about half what it had been at sod-breaking and crop yields declined steadily. And now no western frontier remained. From the vantage of 1930s, crop agriculture in Kansas does not appear very sustainable. All the arable land in Rooks County - and in the nation for that matter – had been identified and plowed. Soil nitrogen and organic carbon drifted steadily downward, and with them yields and profits. Faced with this dilemma, farmers implemented a dramatic innovation in soil nutrient management. Rather than adopt one or more of the ancient strategies, farmers (and the industrial nation behind them) created a new option. They appropriated abundant cheap fossil-fuel energy to import enormous amounts of synthetically manufactured nitrogen onto their fields. …”
page 219, ‘On the Great Plains: Agriculture and Environment’, Cunfer 2005; preview in googlebooks
I wonder how Guyana is tracking ~ https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1773782655546618202