5. Economics Should Be Life Science

Economics Should Be Life Science.
Bob Komives
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In life there is everywhere synergism. Two or more organs, two or more organisms, act together to achieve what neither could achieve alone. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. R. Buckminster Fuller called it "synergy."

Scarcities are microeconomic parts
within macroeconomic abundance.
True to synergy,
we cannot divine the behavior of our abundance
if we study only our scarcities.

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Economists have failed to build a unified theory of abundance out of their keen understanding of scarcity. Why? It cannot be done. Many scientists work to overcome this problem under the general umbrella of the study of complexity. The Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico is one focal point for their work. Such terms as artificial life, self-organizing economies, and increasing returns cover specific topics that draw away from the traditional static models of economics toward the dynamics that we see in nature --that we see in the economy but cannot explain using standard models. I feel confident that their work will deal with both abundance and scarcity and will eventually revolutionize economics --beyond even their expectations.

Economics must be a science
--a human science,
a life science.
Wealth is basic.
It cannot be the invention of humankind.
It must be traced to the bases of life.
It cannot reside mainly in banks and buildings,
moneys and stock.
Primitive people had wealth
but none of these.

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Science is a whole. It tries to encompass all that exists as well as all that may have existed and all that may come to exist. It attempts to describe the rules that govern the universe at all scales and make useful predictions based on these rules. The bodies of theory and information that we call the sciences are artificial, but convenient subdivisions of the whole, science. Physics cannot be separated from chemistry nor from sociology. At their frontiers, and even at their centers, there is overlap and synergy.

:: Bob Komives, Fort Collins © 2006 :: Plum Local IV :: 5. Economics Should Be a Life Science ::
With attribution these words may be freely shared, but permission
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