First, an apology
First things first. My apologies for missing a post. I try to write every weekday evening, but didn't last night. I am suffering a particularly severe case of manflu, and feel I came close to death (yeah, ok, I had a bit of a stuffy nose).
But as I glimpsed the shadow of death, I had a vision for a post. Waste as the shadow economy.
The "real" economy and the shadow economy
It goes a bit like this. In the "real" economy, we take raw materials and progressively transport, compound, add value and ultimately distribute them as products to people.
The shadow economy is the reverse. It takes products from people after they have had a catastrophic liquidation of value, taking a product they paid money to receive and converting it to material they pay money to get rid of. These products are then progressively consolidated into larger and larger flows.
A shadow economy done well would see the waste also purified as they are consolidated. It would seek to reinstate the raw materials making up the product. This is, I think, the transition we are in.
Our current transition
I think waste is a relatively new discovery. I think in the not too distant past we had stuff that needed a bit of love, passed on to others, repurposed. I think it is a recent "innovation" to have items so quickly and catastrophically lose all value such that we can only get rid of it.
With this innovation, we initially sought to just be gone with it. Coarse solutions such as incinerators and landfills to deal with a coarse problem. Once the catastrophic liquidation of value begins, we just go on rolling with it.
I think this is changing. There is a growing subtlety of purpose where the coarse solution is unpicked. Materials are purified rather than combined, industries are developing around the refining, processing, value adding to waste. Until, at some point, it is not longer waste.
And on we roll to society as a whole
The shadow economy notion goes further. Taking the pernicious conflation of "society" to "economy" as a lead, everything that is important in the "real" economy is also important in the shadow waste economy.
And so a multi-disciplinary course at university could truly draw out every single faculty. Not just the obvious Engineering, but also Arts, Law, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine. All of them. Even Economics. None of them would be bit players either; all could reasonably conceive their role to be pivotal to the whole endeavour.
And in closing
This was my thought. Like many of them, I would like to extend it in a future post, but will leave it lie there for now.
I would love your feedback, additional pointers for the shadow economy, revelations, inspirations, delirious ravings. I would also love the simple gesture of you saying "Hi, I'd like to hear more from you!" and your following this conversation a bit further.
Does it feel like you're talking to an empty cyberspace and no one is listening?
ReplyDeleteNot sure I get where you're going with conflating economics and society.... but I'm interested in your idea of the waste economy as being some sort of mirror image of the familiar one. In this analogy, maybe we're still in the early days of mirror technology... maybe we need to improve the mirror before everyone can see through it?
More like a huge hall filled with many conversations, some attracting quite a crowd and myself but a few. However, the hall ebbs and flows in its attentions, and I believe that a great deal of groundwork will eventually lead to overnight success.
DeleteConflating economics and society is nothing more than observing that economists seem to be forever referring to citizens. Plus it enables a bit of a segue from economics into society.
As for the mirror analogy, I think we are indeed early days with the mirror - we have spent a long time as if there was no mirror, and that waste was just a continuation of the old economy. This makes landfill etc natural solutions. Seeing that there is a yin to the yang of our productive economy leads to the natural conclusion that we need to work out how to make everything cycle back. Or, if you will, refine our mirror such that it can more perfectly reflect our economy.
Hi, I do like reading your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteDelirious ravings. I am not quite getting the shadow mirror economy thing, or perhaps I have it, and just don't think of it as such.
From my perspective, the economy is a fictional belief structure, an incomplete model used to explain and now to excuse the behavior of people in society. It is just a visualization. So many factors have historically been excluded from the model, because of the complexity of modeling them, or the inconvenience. For instance, nobody really wants to know, that with our current technology, spent nuclear fuel will persist for thousands of times longer than humanity has existed. How do you factor that cost into a economy.
Perhaps I am already on the other side of the mirror looking back. (or falling down the rabbit hole.)
As opposed to an empty hall, it is a hall that is full a thousand times over, but the people are scattered forward in time. Some looking for answers, some quietly learning, some looking back, to see what we thought, before it all Began!
How did people manage? How did people survive before they had fires to warm their homes, how did people survive without kerosine heaters! How did people survive when they had to burn fossil fuel or Use fission reactions to get their electricity. As opposed to faster horses, I am looking to the future for magic carpets and bottled lightning.