A Sneak Peak from Screwnomics*, Chapter 12...
"The real world economy is very different than that described in standard economic theory, writes economist Sabine O’Hara in her article “Everything Needs Care: An Economy in Context” from a book I’ll revisit in the next chapter. She explains, there is only so much arable land to grow human food and so much water to be polluted or used up. By concentrating only on output and ignoring the biological sources for that output—human and ecological inputs—we are using up non-renewable resources and harming nature’s ability to renew life. That is the ultimate inefficiency.
O’Hara writes, “As restorative and reproductive capacities are impaired, efficiency levels cannot be sustained without ever increasing investments. The results are self-evident. Half of the world’s wetlands, temperate and tropical forests are gone; more than half of all arable land is suffering some degree of deterioration and desertification; oceans are dying and 75 percent of marine fisheries are either over-fished or fished to capacity.”
Without care and attention, earthly communities that support our human ones will come unraveled, and so will we. A rise in human poverty in exhausted environments where people formerly sustained their lives is another marker of our threatened future.
EconoMan finds competition unerringly good. By contrast, biologists find competition a state that brings harm to species. If two species compete for water or a particular food, natural selection requires that one species ultimately dies out—or else adapts. Equilibrium within an ecology results when species efficiently interrelate and reproduce only enough offspring to sustain numbers.
I learned more about adaption when I went to Cape Cod for a field trip seminar on the horseshoe crab..."
