3 ms·

Economics would be a lot more interesting if they discussed things in terms of joules rather than in terms of dollars.

• dredmorbius 13y ago
  I've been exposed to the idea of an energy-backed currency since reading Arthur Clarke's Imperial Earth as a kid (it's actually got a lot to do with energy economics in general, among other themes). More recently I've been looking at some of the principles of dissipative systems and wondering if one of the fundamental inequality equations of that field isn't applicable as a general concept of capital accumulation. Let's see if I can't find that ... OK: the storage function here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system#In_control_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system#In_control_... I've also been kicking around the ideas of, variously, an organism (say, a human), or a herd, or an ecosystem, as an economic analog, and trying to figure out what the equivalent systems within them are. For the body analog, there's the long-standing metaphor within economic literature of the banking system and money as the heart and blood. My read is that these are mistaken -- those correspond to physical constructs within the economy (transportation systems and energy), not the control and signaling systems of the economy. There I think you'd want to map something more on the lines of Ca+ ion exchange or endocrine signaling, though honestly my understanding of biology and systems is pretty loose. I've been meaning to look at how biological and ecological systems signal for resource utilization.