Nine topics to be completed later that were suggested by Douglas Nuttall's ResearchGate Post

 

AUG

14

1. From the family to the community that can be viewed from the top of Aristotle's hill to a sovereign nation, which, perhaps, is, after all, too big

I do not know of any scientific principle that indicates your thesis that communism works best in small groups beginning with the family and less well for very large communities such as entire nations; still I believe that it is true. It is a question of the group, whatever its size, reaching a consensus on important questions, like if the band of robbers comes back should we pay or fight, that everyone can live with. We understand there will be conflict and disagreement along the way. One can opt out by not going to the council meetings at the expense of giving up control of ones own life. 

Direct Aristotelian democracy is the basis for the so-called Fractal Government proposed here so as to ensure that all political power is retained by the people. Since every citizen must be a member of a community council which determines public policy, this basic political molecule must be small enough that the village council can be effective.

Its representative at the next most central council is chosen by sortition but recalled by popular vote if necessary. Thus decentralization must be the ultimate goal regardless of how the present system has to be accommodated. In particular, the largest identifiable political unit should be the drainage region, i. e., the contiguous portion of the land that drains into common reservoirs without any of the neighboring areas draining into it. This is the fundamental unit of land in ecology. (Professor Jorge Gabitto, formerly the chairman of the department of chemical engineering at Prairie View University, pointed out that the our maps are drawn in the most regrettable manner from the viewpoint of ecology. Rivers make convenient borders for map makers but not for ecologists.) The space between the basic molecules and the governing body of the entire ecological region is the fractal-like structure illustrated and discussed elsewhere. Additional necessities for decentralization are well known.

As of today, June 28, 2020, I believe that the greatest difficulty to establishing Dematerialism as imagined by me lies in the conduct of village or neighborhood councils to which every citizen belongs. Any number of difficulties are likely to arise and will place the greatest demands upon the human spirit. Lovers of freedom who believe in humanity will be hard pressed indeed. I am not certain that even a large compendium of advice would be of the slightest use at that time. (Aristotle imagined a community small enough to view from the top of a small hill.)

2. Jules Verne's island and Samuel Butler's Erewhon satisfy Delaney's condition.

 

On Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, six men who escaped from a 

Confederate prison in a balloon and who are moderately conversant with Nineteenth Century technology managed to establish a tiny enclave in which the most important technological features of their contemporary civilization could be obtained. In reality, it might take a little longer to establish the best of modernity.  Suppose they brought their little one- or two-house village up to date.  If someone joined them with new technology, they would have to think hard to decide whether to employ it or banish it to the museum to be  kept for its curiosity, intellectual, and aesthetic values. They might think like Samuel Butler's fictional characters in Erewhon who relegated all inventions made later than a specified date to a museum or they might think like David Delaney.     

The first dependence on economic growth is in the need to avoid the adverse consequences of innovations that reduce the need for labor.1 By definition, each labor-reducing innovation either increases the amount of a good produced or throws some people out of work.  Firms that create or exploit a labor-reducing innovation create new jobs internally by driving other firms out of business.  The new jobs implementing the innovation offset the loss of jobs caused by the innovation, but the innovating firms don’t necessarily hire all of the job losers, because the innovation reduced the total amount of labor needed to produce the original amount of the good.  In order to re-employ all job losers, the economy must grow to produce more of the good with all of the original workers, or produce more of some other good with the cheaper labor (the job losers) now available. In either case the economy grows.  Much of what we consider progress is due to labor-reducing innovations.  In order to live without economic growth, we would have to give up this kind of progress, or introduce arrangements to allow workers who become unproductive to retain their relative wealth and self-respect, or relegate most people to a repressed underclass.  There is a powerful incentive to avoid these contingencies by encouraging economic growth.  - David Delaney

3. How does economic equality affect racial conflict and evolutionary mal-adaptiveness? Why is economic equality both natural, logical, and necessary?

4. Bikes are nice but walking is better for talking.

5. Long lives and low birth rates: Whose posterity is it anyway?

6. "Specialization is for insects."

7. Our misunderstanding of the exponential (Albert Bartlett), for example, one-half percent growth implies doubling time of 140 years. If you began now to address the problem of twice as much economic activity in the same space, would you prepare for it or prevent it? Is 140 years enough time?

8. How does ERoEI* address all of that and ensure that the total energy budget for the community does not diminish as population at first diminishes and then stabilizes? Conservation measures are introduced that also redound to higher standards of living.

9. What I mean by stockpiles of natural capital.