I think that Jochen is right to look at what is being produced. It's a fairly commonplace observation by now that living organisms reduce entropy locally. Someone who is fairly well know wrote as part of a fairly large book (and I can't remember either the author or the book; it's perhaps 5 years old) that a good way to decide when something is productive is to see whether it results in a local decrease in entropy. Most "consumption" is not productive in that sense; most "work" is. "Recreation" can be either.
Living organisms, as Jochen said, "produce" themselves. They also produce other things. Birds build nests. Beavers build dams. Spiders build webs. Most organisms build some sort of home for themselves. All social organisms build social networks of various sorts. So it's not just that organisms build nothing but themselves. We, in our advanced economy have become dependent on building things other than ourselves. That seems to be one of the primary differences. Even though other organisms build other things, for the most part they spend most of their energy building themselves -- and their offspring. Also, the things they build are generally built for themselves -- or at least their social group. Most of us spend most(?) of our energy building things other than ourselves. And they are things that we don't use directly, and often not indirectly. (Although since they are produced for the economy, and we are part of the economy, perhaps that's not strictly true.) Not only that, we depend on a demand for the things we build (and I'm using "build" very broadly to refer to any kind of paid work) to supply us with the means to get the resources necessary to build ourselves, i.e., to buy food. Other organisms don't depend on demand to supply their resources. Symbiotic species combinations make this even more difficult to analyze. What about the bacteria in our gut, for example? They depend on the demand we make of them to help us digest food. And we pay them with nutrients. Without the demand for their services, e.g., if we die, so do they. I think this is a direction worth pursuing. Sorry if this post has been somewhat ragged. There are a lot of pieces that should be disentangled. -- Russ Abbott ______________________________________ Professor, Computer Science California State University, Los Angeles Google voice: 424-242-USA0 (last character is zero) blog: http://russabbott.blogspot.com/ vita: http://sites.google.com/site/russabbott/ ______________________________________ On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 12:42 PM, Jochen Fromm <jfr...@t-online.de> wrote: > Tory is right, ecologic systems and especially > their inhabitants, the living organisms, look > more complex than companies or corporations. > What I meant was that there seem to be a > fundamental difference in the input-output > relations. > > The output of agents in economic systems is > a product made from the inputs during the > business process. In ecologic systems this is > only comparable to the cognitive part of > organisms, where perceptions are processed to > produce an action. In the "food web" there is > nothing produced except the organisms themselves. > Whenever there is something interesting happening > in nature, it is either supper time or pairing > time. The former is used to sustain the body, > the latter to sustain the species. This is > different from economies, isn't it? > > -J. > > ----- Original Message ----- From: Eric Smith > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Sent: Monday, October 18, 2010 12:02 PM > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Economy vs. ecology, er > > The acts that organisms take, merely in the course of living from one day > to the next, tend to be under-emphasized in relation to the acts of > reproducing. But the input-output relations of ecology should correspond > fairly nicely to the input-output relations of the economy, if either were a > well-formed technical theory. In economics, input-output goes under the > names Leontief I/O theory, or closely related von Neumann-Gale growth > theory. I have often wished that either had more of the strictness of > chemical input/output relations -- at least where such are warranted -- but > that is not yet the case, as both fields have been more interested in the > flexibility afforded by innovation than in the constraints that limit the > landscape. > > In terms of what organisms do to each other, whether intentionally or > inadvertently, there are the two names "Niche Construction" and "ecosystem > engineering". The first has a book by Laland, Odling-Smee, and Feldman. > It's a big area, and the book only opens the topic, but it's a start. Many > of the ideas are general enough that they are equally comfortable in the > economy, which is, as you say, part of the global ecosystem. > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >
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