Skip to main content

counting

Economics, Science, and Religion 7

[7]


previous     /     next slide

2) In economics, the modern world view fails to apply the laws of thermodynamics (especially the second one) to humans and their actions.

As formulated by Rudolf Clausius in 1850, every thermodynamic work process, in order to take place at all (and any energy-driven, material, economic process is necessarily thermodynamic due to these very properties) must render an inescapable net loss (and even the re-production of one's own self, in a twenty-year production process, must be so defined).

This necessary loss accumulates down the labor and food chain, at the beginning (!) of which it must be compensated for, and that free of charge, or else this chain will immediately break: In the real, material, physical world, there is no such thing as "debt": something exists, or it does not.

What is missing in the end must be superfluous at the beginning - not just balanced; this primary surplus then limits the net outcome of any work process.

As long as this inevitable thermodynamic loss occurred "only" within the food chain, it was self-evident; a man had to be worth his bread, or he would starve.

Humans, in general, must take in 2-3 times the energy they can put out - which is around 1 kWh per day, currently worth around $0.50 (and the results of comparing human decision costs to those of IT electronics are even far worse).

However, in industrialized societies, humans pay each other sums vastly higher than their physical comparative worth would justify - precisely because the primary input is for free, and its deployment costs are comparatively low; while in non- industrialized countries, mean labor is still often compensated for by the proverbial "dollar a day", which barely keeps a human being alive; but, due to thermodynamics, even so is more than that being can deliver, running up deficits even there.

With the invention of the steam engine, that necessary thermodynamic net loss could be externalized (at least in part); and Karl Marx, as described before, in line with his adversaries, declared the same working people that were tendencially being made obsolete by this externalization - and not, for example, the working horse - to be the producers of physically non-existent gains - in the physical world, a loss; which, in the end, has to appear in the balance sheets as some sort of debt.

In truth, monetary wealth and debt always cancel each other out, and the reduction of debt is the easiest way to reduce monetary wealth; together they reflect the thermodynamic net loss of industry and labor, with its inherent and necessary mutual overpayment: This running debt must be "just high enough" (Ronald Reagan) to reflect a country's net ability to perform work - i. e. run up a deficit.


The result of this is economic disorientation, confusing abstract monetary wealth (used resources) with concrete material wealth (unused resources).

Though the various schools and teachings of industrialized economics will be taken as alternative religions (replacing the ancient God-givenness of things), they can, as such, provide no more than the same cryptic and uncertain future forecasts as did the former; on average, their prophecies and instructions may lead astray in every other case as well, making them as valuable as random ones in that respect.

And as before, apart from a few financial cult leaders and gurus, those win the game who recognize it as one and come to master it.


previous     /     next slide

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

360 Degrees - Division in Time and Space

360 Degrees The partitioning of time and space into 360 steps Partitioning a whole into 360 degrees / 60 minutes with a compass and a ruler as universal instruments for the division of space and time The partitioning of a full circle as a representative of the whole into 360 degrees goes back to Babylonian times of farming and simple technology  - 5000 years ago, around 3000 BC to 300 BC. Our current decimal number system is based on the number 10; their numerical system was based on the number 60 . In those days, the emphasis was not , as it is today, on arbitrarily precise mathematics, but on those principally so; it was not about calculations ( these were then neither possible nor needed ), but about division and construction of artifacts with available aids . Within simple life, symmetry, dividing evenly, and fair and correct sharing, are of big, if not existential importance. Since reality itself is but an approxim...
Post a Comment
Read more

German humor

😀   Rough and politically wrong. In a fake TV documentary many years ago, some faked 'Citizens of Poland' in very loud clothes 'claimed' that their deceased uncle had authored every pop song of the last century, and proceeded to prove this by playing them with tubas and other very loud instruments - making every one sound like a polka. The whole extended family joins in, ' Seductive Sis ' sings while her pay-by-call phone number is displayed on the screen, and so on. "Having stolen their electricity" (another bad cliche, if anything, we're stealing theirs), they are 'forced' to turn the volume down to a whisper from their side so as not to attract too much attention, thereby forcing everyone watching the show to turn up their own TV sets to *full volume* so as to even hear anything - knowing full well they would suddenly turn it up again at the other end, but not WHEN... After lulling the audience by drawing it into the nati...
Post a Comment
Read more

Economics, Science, and Religion 2

[2] previous     /     next slide In 1859 , Charles Darwin published his observations on the origin of species , which introduced the concept of evolution into the social discussion: not only in the field of biology , but, as a side effect, in geology as well; the world was no longer static , a completed creation, but a dynamic one, constantly evolving; or at least it had been in the past . However, Creation itself was still in some way considered to be complete and static , at least as far as it was projected into the future ; meaning that evolution may have been the way things had developed up to the present , but no further ; the question why this should be so was carefully avoided. This is just one of the many unsolved paradoxes and mysteries resulting from the incomplete implementation of the discoveries made during the era of industrialization: If the world and its human inhabitants are the result of an evolutionary process, then that ...
Post a Comment
Read more