| | Thank you both for watching that model, I'm glad you found something in it that you liked.
Like all models, it is incomplete. For instance, I struggled with showing the most important aspect of all that 'pump pulling' which is what ultimately drives the economies in my model, and that is(in my mind)the primary role of unavoidable risk in the universe, as it is, and how we fairly manage that risk.
Think of the following. Imagine you are a robot explorer with a finite battery, and you land on an alien planet. You have only an incomplete map of the local resources, intelligent guesses. There is no sunlight, but you have enough battery power to travel some finite distance, say, 100 kM. You land in the middle of 3 candidate sites where there -might- be alternative energy. You have enough power to investigate 1 of the 3 sites. You have the evidence of past robot explorers, and can see two sets of their trails leading to site A, but ... nobody ever heard back from them. You have to assess an uncertain plan of action, because success is not guaranteed, the right answer is not 100% known in advance. The Universe is not playing with us, but neither is it blindly coughing up the answers in the back of the book. It just is. So, we have to make an informed guess, with success at risk. We can shade that risk using all of our intellect and past history and current resources, but ultimately, we cannot be guaranteed success with every endeavor. We could spend more of our energy than we obtain looking for new energy. We live with some element of risk, defined as, the possibility of expending more value in pursuit of replacement value than we realize in return. Loss, as opposed to, profit. Failure as opposed to success.
We are not so unlike that robot explorer with its finite resources. Our individual mote of heat and light and vitality is finite. We do not necessarily know, from day to day, whether the best use of our energies is to fish the deep or fish the shallows, because the right answer is not always the same from day to day.
We must face and manage that risk in the universe, as it is.
One strategy is to minimize risk by way of intelligent analysis. This is hard, requires focused effort and exertion of our talents, the best within us, to the best of our abilities. This approach actually minimizes risk, though does not eliminate it.
Another strategy is to shed risk onto others. This is far easier, if we can get away with it. We certainly get away with it as children. This does not eliminate risk in total, it simply allows some to painlessly shed the consequences of risk onto others.
But, what of adults in our political context? Where is the incentive to bust a gut and minimize risk when so much of out tribal strategy is increasingly based on shedding risk onto others?
Didn't know how to represent that in my pump/turbine model, but pulling on pump handles is effort at risk, and our incentive to make the effort to pull on pump handles is the engine that drives our economies.
regards
Fred
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