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In biology we understand fairly well that environmental complexity leads to greater biodiversity. If the Earth's environment were entirely uniform there would p

• TeMPOraL 6y ago
  The more I think of it, the more I realize, biology is very much unlike the market in such analogies. In a way, the market is biology flipped on its side, like a transposed matrix - where in nature, life forms mostly cooperate within their species (or at least ignore each other) and prey on other species, on the market, companies of the same type fight it out, while ignoring or cooperating with companies of different types. But I think the main difference is scale. The area of influence of a life form - where they live, hunt, reproduce - is very limited. Same is true with companies serving local markets. A local glass factory. A corner market. You say: > Global highly efficient markets are like a polished flat globe with a uniform climate everywhere. But it's not just a flat globe. It's a globe with a surface of couple dozen square kilometers! It's literally a single niche. Not even that - it's a cage. Imagine a zoo that decided to put all its animals in a single, large cage. You won't have to wait much before there's only one big animal standing (and a bunch of insects scattering about). On a more general note: biology is a good example that you can make a complex and robust system by giving imperfectly-self-reproducing agents a lot of space to play in, and then throwing calamities at them to keep things interesting. But I honestly don't like using it as a recipe for designing systems, because of all the waste that's involved. Waste of effort, waste of resources, waste of life. I feel we should avoid this kind of hard self-regulation whenever we can.
  • shkkmo 6y ago
    > where in nature, life forms mostly cooperate within their species (or at least ignore each other) This is blatantly not true. There are condiserable levels of intra-species competition in many species. Even in "cooperative" species, those animals cooperate in groups, but then those groups compete against each other. Most predators prey on a very limited subset of the ecology. You seemly cannot reliably predict inter vs intra species like you seem to think. Also "preying on" is pretty different that "competeing with" and at the ecological scale, predation looks much more like interactions between industries than competition within an industry. Thus the correct mapping of the analogy in this case is between ecological niches and industries. Regarding your more general note: I think there is a trade off between efficiency and robustness. Top down heirachical structures (most companies, militaries, etc) are generally more efficient in terms of resources used but are vulnerable to broken/inefficient/disengenous nodes, especially for the higher nodes. Bottom up solutions (markets, grassroots movements, etc) tend to use more total resources but do better at dealing with bad nodes and are thus less failure prone. I would argue that the best systems tend to layer combinations of these two types of systems. Edit: In the US for example, we (simplistically) have a bottom up democracy that governs a top down government that regulates bottom up markets that are participated in by top down companies that increasingly rely on outsourcing core functionality to other bottom up markets that that top down particpants.
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    The market / biology comparison is interesting, though probably needs some work. Firms, at least to a certain size, are about increased specialisation. That is, they focus on doing one thing. Rather than predator/prey relationships, firms have exchange relationships, arbitraging off of distinct specialisations and differential capabilities, with much of that being supply-chain related. (A recent discussion of semiconductor fabrication noted that an end-product device might comprise of 1,000 or more individual steps, and 70 or more logistical (that is, shipping) links before reaching the final purchaser.) Individual organisms are, at least to a first approximation, generalists. They must source food or sustenance, provide for circulation, metabolism, health, etc. Plants have structural and photosynthetic requirements. Many animals have sensing, neurological, mobility, and defence functions. The largest individual organisms still occupy only tiny fractions of the Earth's surface individually --- whales, fungi, slime molds, clonal trees. Past a certain point, organisms simply cannot coordinate at large scale within a single entity. So the reason single firms fight amongst others of similar stripe is because each is attempting to control a highly specialised niche. (There's another question of just where and how businesses become extensive. The question of organisation of industry by type or sector goes back to Quesnay and in modern variants seems to be seen as 4--5 distinct levels. I'd argue that it's network-based firms which are most likely to be expansive, though that includes a fairly broad notion of just what a network is. See: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/74dm5o/seeking_research_on_inclusive_measures_of/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/74dm5o/seeking...) The scale question is interesting. Yes, individual human firms are far larger than the alrgest organisms. But the range of scales found in nature remains larger. You can look at length, volume, mass, or metabolism. The smallest bacteria are about 0.2 nm in length, which (assuming density of water) is about 310^-17kg The largest blue whale is 30m in length, and 17,000 kg. (There are larger organisms, giant sequoia trees, slime molds, clonal trees. They shift the calculus by a few more orders of magnitude.) That's a length difference of about 150 million (10^8), and a mass differential of about 507 billion billion (10^20). On either measure, the range from smallest to largest firm would be smaller, if only because the human population has not yet reached 507 billion billion. (In looking at metabolism, values are harder to find, especially for bacteria. A blue whale has a basal metabolic rate of about a half-million kilocalories (food calories) per day, with a total* expenditure larger than that. The metabolism of mammals scales as BMR=KM^(2/3), that is, to the 2/3 power of mass. Economic metabolism is at the rate of approximately $1,000/barreloil.) By absolute magnitude, the largest firms are of course larger than the largest animals or plants. Much of that comes from an ability to both organise and process inputs at a much larger scale. For an organism to operate at global scale, it would need to physically be global scale. A firm virtualises many of its coordination activities through communications --- a sort of "spooky action at a distance", if you will. James Beniger, The Control Revolution (1986) (one of several books by the same title), listed in the Reddit post above, discusses much of the development of this. In a sense, a firm is a financial, legal, commercial, social, technical, and organisational virtual construct. What firms can do that organisms cannot is incorporate other freestanding entities within themselves. "Mergers and acquisitions" is not a chapter you'll find in a biology text. It's an extraordinarily common business practice. If not always a successful one. Geoffrey West, Scale looks into the question of magnitudes as well. https://www.worldcat.org/title/scale-the-universal-laws-of-growth-innovation-sustainability-and-the-pace-of-life-in-organisms-cities-economies-and-companies/oclc/981575429&referer=space_alien_cat https://www.worldcat.org/title/scale-the-universal-laws-of-g...
• arp242 6y ago
  This sounds unlikely; even with just one species sooner or later a random mutation would give some individuals an "edge" over others in some area, and others would get an "edge" in some other way. Different strategies will evolve, especially if we consider the hunter/prey arms race. Less biodiversity? Sure. But one or two species? Probably not.
  • api 6y ago
    Look into game theory and Nash equilibria. Mutations will happen constantly but they won't be likely to "take."
    • arp242 6y ago
      I'm not sure if this applies equally well to large complex systems as it does to comparatively simple and limited systems. A polished flat globe with a uniform climate would still be a very complex system.
• dredmorbius 6y ago
  Island vs. mainland evolution is probably an apt comparison. On a mainland (a region with widespread intercommunication within a species), speciation is relatively rare (baring catastrophic events). On an island, any given mutation is proportionately a larger share of the genome already, and has an opportunity to take hold even if there is little or no relative advantage. (Evolution is a case of natural selection, with the presumption being that that selection is itself beneficial. In truth, "benefit" can be wide-ranging, and genetic drift where a set of equipotent or merely latent advantages occur and are distributed are frequent. There's also the distinction between what I call exogenous and endogenous selectors. The former are imposed by the environment, the latter from within the social behaviour of the species itself (assuming social behaviours). There are also purely random events --- getting hit by an asteroid or consumed by a volcano, say --- though one might argue that vigelance plays a role here.) But yes, a globally-interconnected world with common trade interests, exchange, languages, etc., is one that's been flattened and made uniform. One suspects that disuniformities may eventually appear and change the economic calculus. One force that seems highly potent at present, and underappreciated, is the reliance on energy (oil) and strategic minerals, both either only or highly preferentially accessible in specific locations. My view of the post-WWII global dynamic is that it makes far more sense to consider it as an interplay between three major oil-producing regions: the Soviet bloc which was both a largely self-sufficient producer (Baku) and exporter, the Western bloc (NATO, ASEAN, Japan, South Korea) which was a major producer, but relied increasingly on imports, and the swing bloc of the OPEC states (notably Saudi Arabia, though also Iran, Libya, Iraq, smaller Gulf states, and others). The US/NATO posture of protecting and defending global oil production and transport emerges in this context. The Soviet bloc could rely on land-based pipeline transport to a far greater extent. Strategic minerals, largely derived from Africa, spell out much the rest of this story. There's more explanation in this to my mind than many of the ideological explanations. My sense is that ideology itself more likely flows from the geopolitical dynamics. As relates to future geopolitics: the general sense is that oil will diminish in signficance (probably, though not certainly). But an advanced electrified world relies increasingly on exotic elements either not widely available (e.g., coltan), or which, whilst not rare per se, have exceedingly messy extraction processes (the so-called "rare earths", actually reasonably abundant but not ore-forming, meaning that even "rich" deposits are actually low concentrations, requiring much overburden removal, processing, and tailings. Lithium already appears poised to be the next energy storage medium, and is similarly to oil nonuniformly distributed globally. Seawater extraction seems one possible way around that limitation, though at 1ppm concentrations, that's a challenge. Possibly if integrated with other seawater-based activities (desalination, seawater-based fuel synthesis, etc.).