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ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE

By Douglas Rushkoff [8.11.09] Topic: CULTURE We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems.

WHAT'S RELATED
People Douglas Rushkoff Media Analyst; Documentary W riter; Author, Present Shock

Contributors George Dyson Science Historian; Author, Turing's... [ Read ]

BOOKS

ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE [8.11.09] By Douglas Rushkoff An Edge Original Essay DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is a media analyst; documentary filmmaker, and author. His latest book is L ife Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. Doulgas Rushkoff's Edge Bio Page The Reality Club: George Dyson

Present Shock: W hen Everything Happens Now By Douglas Rushkoff Hardcover [2013]

Life Inc.: How the W orld Became a... By Douglas Rushkoff Hardcover [2009]

ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE The marketplace in w hich most commerce takes place today is not a pre-existing condition of the universe. It's not nature. It's a game, w ith very particular rules, set in motion by real people w ith real purposes. That's w hy it's so amazing to me that scientists, and people calling themselves
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ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE | Edge.org

scientists, w ould propose to study the market as if it w ere some natural system like the w eather, or a coral reef. It's not. It's a product not of nature but of engineering. And to treat the market as nature, as some product of purely evolutionary forces, is to deny ourselves access to its ongoing redesign. It's as if w e w oke up in a w orld w here just one operating system w as running on all our computers and, w orse, w e didn't realize that any other operating system ever did or could ever exist. W e w ould simply accept W indow s as a given circumstance, and look for w ays to adjust our society to its needs rather than the other w ay around. It is up to our most rigorous thinkers and w riters not to base their w ork on w idely accepted but largely artificial constructs. It is their job to differentiate betw een the map and the territory to recognize w hen a series of false assumptions is corrupting their observations and conclusions. As the great interest in the arguments of Richard Daw kins, Daniel Dennett,Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens show s us, there is a grow ing acceptance and hunger for thinkers w ho dare to challenge the w idespread belief in creation mythologies. That it has become easier to challenge the supremacy of God than to question the supremacy of the market testifies to the w ay any group can fall victim to a creation myth especially w hen they are rew arded to do so. Too many technologists, scientists, w riters and theorists accept the underlying premise of our corporate-driven marketplace as a precondition of the universe or, w orse, as the ultimate beneficiary of their findings. If a "free" economy of the sort depicted by Chris Anderson or Clay Shirky is really on its w ay, then books themselves are soon to be little more than loss leaders for high-priced corporate lecturing. In such a scheme how could professional w riters and theorists possibly escape biasing their w orks tow ards the needs of the corporate lecture market? It's as if the value of a theory or perspective rests solely in its applicability to the business sector. W hether it's being done in honest ignorance, blind obedience, or cynical exploitation of the market, the result is the same: our ability to envision new solutions to the latest challenges is stunted by a dependence on market-driven and market-compatible answ ers. Instead, w e are encouraged to apply the rules of genetics, neuroscience, or systems theory to the economy, and to do so in a dangerously determinist fashion. In their ongoing effort to define and the defend the functioning of the market through science and systems theory, some of today's brightest thinkers have, perhaps inadvertently, promoted a mythology about commerce, culture, and competition. And it is a mythology as false, dangerous, and ultimately deadly as any religion. The trend began on the pages of the digital business magazine, W ired, w hich served to reframe new tech innovations and science discoveries in terms friendly to disoriented speculators. W ired w ould not fundamentally challenge the market; it w ould provide bankers and investors w ith a map to the new territory, including the consultants they'd need to maintain their authority over the economy.

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Exit Strategy By Douglas Rushkoff Paperback [2002] Playing the Future: W hat W e Can Learn from... By Douglas Rushkoff Paperback [1999]

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ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE | Edge.org they'd need to maintain their

authority over the economy.

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The first and probably most influential among them w as Peter Schw artz, w ho, in 1997, w ith Peter Leyden, forecast a "long boom" of at least 25 years of prosperity and environmental health fueled by digital technology and, most importantly, the maintenance of open markets. Kevin Kelly foresaw the w ay digital abundance w ould challenge scarce markets, and offered clear rules through w hich the largest companies could still thrive on the phenomenon. Stew art Brand joined Schw artz and others in cofounding GBN, a futurist consulting firm w hose very name Global Business Netw ork , seemed to cast the emergence of a w eb economy in a new light. W hat did it mean that everyone from W illiam Gibson to Brian Eno to Marvin Minsky w ould now be consulting to the biggest corporations on earth? W ould they even be able to control their ow n messages? Brand did famously say in 1984 that "information w ants to be free." But, much less publicized and remembered, he did so only after explaining that "information w ants to be expensive, because it's so valuable." W ould his and others' w ork now be parsed for the tidbits most effective at promoting a skew ed vision of the new economy? W ould the counterculture be able to use its new found access to the board rooms of the Fortune 500 to hack the business landscape, or had they simply surrendered to the eventual absorption of everything and everyone to an eternal primacy of corporate capitalism? The "scenario plans" that resulted from this w ork, through w hich corporations could envision continued domination of their industries, appeared to indicate the latter. Chris Anderson has analyzed w here all this is going, and rather than offering up a vision of a post-scarcity economy advised companies to simply leverage the abundant to sell w hatever they can keep scarce. Likew ise, Tim O'Reilly and John Batelle's new , highly dimensional conception of the net W eb Squared ultimately offers itself up as a template through w hich companies can make money by controlling the indexes people use to navigate information space. Both science and technology are challenging long-held assumptions about top-dow n control, competition, and scarcity. But our leading thinkers are less likely to provide us w ith genuinely revolutionary axioms for a more highly evolved marketplace than reactionary responses to the netw orks, technologies, and discoveries that threaten to expose the marketplace for the arbitrarily designed poker game it is. They are not new rules for a new economy, but new rules for propping up old economic interests in the face of massive decentralization. W hile w e can find evidence of the corporate marketplace biasing the application of any field of inquiry, it is our limited economic perspective that prevents us from supporting w ork that serves values external to the market. This is w hy it is particularly treacherous to limit economic thought to the game as it is currently played, and to present these arguments w ith near-scientific certainty. The sense of inevitability and pre-destiny shaping these narratives, as w ell as their ultimate obedience to market dogma, is most dangerous, how ever, for the w ay it trickles dow n to w riters and theorists less
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Media Virus! Children of Chaos: Hidden Agendas in Surviving the Popular... End of By Douglas the... Rushkoff By Douglas Paperback Rushkoff Hardcover [1997] [1996]

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directly or consciously concerned w ith market forces. It fosters, both directly and by example, a w illingness to apply genetics, neuroscience, or systems theory to the economy, and of doing so in a decidedly determinist and often sloppy fashion. Then, the pull of the market itself does the rest of the w ork, tilting the ideas of many of today's best minds tow ard the agenda of the highest bidder. So Steven Johnson ends up leaning, perhaps more than he should, on the corporate-friendly evidence that commercial TV and video games are actually healthy. (Think of how many corporations w ould hire a speaker w ho argued that everything bad like marketing and media is actually bad for you.) Likew ise, Malcolm Gladw ell finds himself repeatedly using recent discoveries from neuroscience to argue that higher human cognition is more than trumped by reptilian impulse; w e may as w ell be guided by advertising professionals, since w e're just acting mindlessly in response to crude stimuli, anyw ay. Everything becomes about business and that's more than okay. This w idespread acceptance of the current economic order as a fact of nature ends up compromising the impact of new findings, and changing the public's relationship to the science going on around them. These authors do not chronicle (or celebrate) the full frontal assault that new technologies and scientific discoveries pose to, say, the monopolization of value creation or the centralization of currency. Instead, they sell corporations a new , science-based algorithm for strategic investing on the new landscape. Higher sales reports and lecture fees serve as positive reinforcement for authors to incorporate the market's bias even more enthusiastically the next time out. W rite books that business likes, and you do better business. The cycle is selfperpetuating. But just because it pays the mortgage doesn't make it true. In fact, thanks to their blind acceptance of a particular theory of the market, most of these concepts end up failing to accurately predict the future. Instead of 25 years of prosperity and eco-health, w e got the dotcom bust and global w arming. Immersion in media is not really good for us. People are capable of responding to a more complex call to action than the over-simplified and emotional rants of right-w ing ideologues. The decentralizing effect of new media has been met by an overw helming concentration of corporate conglomeration. These theories fail not because the math or science underlying them is false, but rather because it is being inappropriately applied. Yet too many theorists keep buying into them, desperate for some logical flourish through w hich the premise of scarcity can somehow fit in, and business audiences w on. In the process, they ignore the genuinely relevant question: w hether the economic model, the game rules set in place half a millennium ago by kings w ith armies, can continue to hold back the genuine market activity of people enabled by computers. People are beginning to create and exchange value again, and they are coming to realize the market they have taken for granted is not a condition of nature. This is the threat and no amount of theoretical recontextualization is going to change that or successfully prevent it. Making Markets: From Abundance To Artificial Scarcity Baidarka: The Kayak Darw in Among The Machines: The Evolution Of... By George Dyson Paperback [1998] By George Dyson Paperback [1986]

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EVENTS
Edge-Serpentine GalleryMAPS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY Special Events [ 10.16.10 ]

TOPICS
CULTURE

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ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE | Edge.org Making Markets: From Abundance

To Artificial Scarcity

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The economy in w hich w e operate is not a natural system, but a set of rules developed in the Late Middle Ages in order to prevent the unchecked rise of a merchant class that w as creating and exchanging value w ith impunity. This w as w hat w e might today call a peer-to-peer economy, and did not depend on central employers or even central currency. People brought grain in from the fields, had it w eighed at a grain store, and left w ith a receipt usually stamped into a thin piece of foil. The foil could be torn into smaller pieces and used as currency in tow n. Each piece represented a specific amount of grain. The money w as quite literally earned into existence and the total amount in circulation reflected the abundance of the crop. Now the interesting thing about this money is that it lost value over time. The grain store had to be paid, some of the grain w as lost to rats and spoilage. So each year, the grain store w ould reissue the money for any grain that hadn't actually been claimed. This meant that the money w as biased tow ards transactions tow ards circulation, rather than hording. People w anted to spend it. And the more money circulates (to a point) the better and more bountiful the economy. Preventative maintenance on machinery, research and development on new w indmills and w ater w heels, w as at a high. Many tow ns became so prosperous that they invested in long-term projects, like cathedrals. The "Age of Cathedrals" of this preRenaissance period w as not funded by the Vatican, but by the bottomup activity of vibrant local economies. The w ork w eek got shorter, people got taller, and life expectancy increased. (W ere the Late Middle Ages perfect? No not by any means. I am not in any w ay calling for a return to the Middle Ages. But an honest appraisal of the economic mechanisms in place before our ow n is required if w e are ever going to contend w ith the biases of the system w e are currently mistaking for the w ay it has alw ays and must alw ays be.) Feudal lords, early kings, and the aristocracy w ere not participating in this w ealth creation. Their families hadn't created value in centuries, and they needed a mechanism through w hich to maintain their ow n stature in the face of a rising middle class. The tw o ideas they came up w ith are still w ith us today in essentially the same form, and have become so embedded in commerce that w e mistake them for preexisting law s of economic activity. The first innovation w as to centralize currency. W hat better w ay for the already rich to maintain their w ealth than to make money scarce? Monarchs forcibly made abundant local currencies illegal, and required people to exchange value through artificially scarce central currencies, instead. Not only w as centrally issued money easier to tax, but it gave central banks an easy w ay to extract value through debasement (removing gold content). The bias of scarce currency, how ever, w as tow ards hording. Those w ith access to the treasury could accrue w ealth by lending or investing passively in value creation by others. Prosperity on the periphery quickly diminished as value w as draw n tow ard the center. W ithin a few decades of the establishment of central currency in France came local poverty, an end to subsistence
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farming, and the plague. (The economy w e now celebrate as the happy result of these Renaissance innovations only took effect after Europe had lost half of its population.) As it's currently practiced, the issuance of currency a public utility, really is still controlled in much the same manner by central banks. They issue the currency in the form of a loan to a bank, w hich in turn loans it a business. Each borrow er must pay back more then he has acquired, necessitating competition and more borrow ing. An economy w ith a strictly enforced central currency must expand at the rate of debt; it is no longer ruled principally by the law s of supply and demand, but the debt structures of its lenders and borrow ers. Those w ho can't grow organically must acquire businesses in order to grow artificially. Even though nearly 80% of mergers and acquisitions fail to create value for either party, the rules of a debt-based economy and the shareholders it w as developed to favor insist on grow th at the expense of long-term value. The second great innovation w as the chartered monopoly, through w hich kings could grant exclusive control over a sector or region to a favored company in return for an investment in the enterprise. This gave rise to monopoly markets, such as the British East India Trading Company's exclusive right to trade in the American Colonies. Colonists w ho grew cotton w ere not permitted to sell it to other people or, w orse, fabricate clothes. These activities w ould have generated value from the bottom up, in a w ay that could not have been extracted by a central authority. Instead, colonists w ere required to sell cotton to the Company, at fixed prices, w ho shipped it back to England w here it w as fabricated into clothes by another chartered monopoly, and then shipped to back to America for sale to the colonists. It w as not more efficient; it w as simply more extractive. The resulting economy encouraged and often forced people to accept employment from chartered corporations rather than create value for themselves. W hen natives of the Indies began making rope to sell to the Dutch East India Trading Company, the Company sought and w on law s making rope fabrication in the Indies illegal for anyone except the Company itself. Former rope-makers had to close their w orkshops, and w ork instead for low er w ages as employees of the company. W e ended up w ith an economy based in scarcity and competition rather than abundance and collaboration; an economy that requires grow th and eschew s sustainable business models. It may or may not better reflect the law s of nature and that it is a conversation w e really should have but it is certainly not the result of entirely natural set of principles in action. It is a system designed by certain people at a certain moment in history, w ith very specific interests. Like artists of the Renaissance, w ho w ere required to find patrons to support their w ork, most scientists, mathematicians, theorists, and technologists today must find support from either the public or private sectors to carry on their w ork. This support is not w on by calling attention to the Monopoly board most of us mistake for the real economy. It is w on by applying insights to the techniques through w hich their patrons can better play the game.
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This has biased their observations and their conclusions. Like John Nash, w ho carried out game theory experiments for RAND in the 1950's, these business consultants see competition and self-interest w here there is none, and reject all evidence to the contrary. Although he later recanted his conclusions, Nash and his colleagues couldn't believe that their subjects w ould choose a collaborative course of action w hen presented w ith the "prisoner's dilemma," and simply ignored their initial results. Likew ise, the proponents of today's digital libertarianism exploit any evidence they can find of evolutionary principles that reflect the fundamental competitiveness of human beings and other life forms, w hile ignoring the much more rigorously gathered evidence of cooperation as a primary human social skill. The late archeologist Glynn Isaac, for one, demonstrated how food sharing, labor distribution, social netw orking and other collaborative activities are w hat gave our evolutionary forefathers the ability to survive. Harvard biologist Ian Gilby's research on hunting among bats and chimps demonstrates advanced forms of cooperation, collective action, and sharing of meat disproportional to the risks taken to kill it. Instead, it is more popular to focus on the self-interested battle for survival of the fittest. W hether or not he intends his w ork to be used this w ay,Steven Pinker's arguments about decreasing violence among humans over time are employed by others as evidence of the free market's peaceful influence on civilization. Ray Kurzw eil relegates the entire human race to a subordinate role in the much more significant evolution of machines a dehumanizing stance that dovetails all too w ell w ith an industrial marketplace in w hich most human beings are now relegated to the reactive role of consumers. In Chris Anderson's vision of the coming "Petabyte Age," no human scientists are even required. That's because the structures that emerge from multi-dimensional data sets w ill be self-organizing and self-apparent. The emergent properties of natural systems and artificial markets are treated interchangeably. Like Adam Smith's "invisible hand," or Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's notion of "catallaxy," markets are predestined to reach equilibrium by their very nature. Just like any other complex, natural system. In short, these economic theories are selecting examples from nature to confirm the properties of a w holly designed marketplace: selfinterested actors, inevitable equilibrium, a scarcity of resources, competition for survival. In doing so, they confirm or at the very least, reinforce the false idea that the law s of an artificially scarce fiscal scheme are a species' inheritance rather than a social construction enforced w ith gunpow der. At the very least, the language of science confers undeserved authority on these blindly accepted economic assumptions. The Net Effect W orst of all, w hen a potentially destabilizing and decentralizing medium such as the Internet comes along, this half-true and halfhearted style of inquiry follow s the story only until a means to arrest its development is discovered and new strategies may be offered.
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The open source ethos, through w hich anyone w ho understands the code can effectively redesign a program to his ow n liking, is repackaged by Jeff How e as "crow dsourcing" through w hich corporations can once again harness the tremendous potential of real people acting in concert, for free. Viral media is reinvented by Malcolm Gladw ell as "social contagion," or Tim Draper as "viral marketing" techniques through w hich mass marketers can once again define human choice as a series of consumer decisions. The decentralizing bias of new media is thus accepted and interpolated only until the market's intellectual guard can devise a new countermeasure for their patrons to employ on behalf of preserving business as usual. Meanw hile, the same corporate libertarian think tanks using Richard Daw kins' theories of evolution to falsely justify the chaotic logic of capitalism through their w hite papers also advise politicians how to exploit the beliefs of fundamentalist Christian creationists in order to garner public support for self-sufficiency as a state of personal grace, and to galvanize suspicion of a w elfare state. This is cynical at best. It doesn't take a genius or a scientist to understand how the rules of the economic game as it is currently played reflect neither human values nor the law s of physics. The market cannot expand infinitely like the redshifts in Hubble's universe. How many other species attempt to store up enough fat during their productive years so that they can simply "retire" on their horded resources? How could a metric like the GNP accurately reflect the health of the real economy w hen toxic spills and disease epidemics alike actually count as short-term booms? The Internet may be very much like a rhizome, but it is still energized by a currency that is anything but a neutral player. Most Internet business enthusiasts applaud Google's efforts to build open systems the same w ay their predecessors applauded the W orld Bank's gift of open markets to developing nations around the w orld utterly unaw are of (or unw illing to look at) w hat exactly w e are opening our w orld to. The net (w hether w e're talking W eb 2.0, W ikipedia, social netw orks or laptops) offers people the opportunity to build economies based on different rules commerce that exists outside the economic map w e have mistaken for the territory of human interaction. W e can startup and even scale companies w ith little or no money, making the banks and investment capital on w hich business once depended obsolete. That's the real reason for the so-called economic crisis: there is less of a market for the debt on w hich the top-heavy game is based. W e can develop local and complementary currencies, barter netw orks, and other exchange systems independently of a central bank, and carry out secure transactions w ith our cell phones. In doing so, w e become capable of imagining a marketplace based in something other than scarcity a requirement if w e're ever going to find a w ay to employ an abundant energy supply. It's not that w e don't have the technological means to source renew able energy; it's that w e don't have a market concept capable of contending w ith
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abundance. As Buckminster Fuller w ould remind us: these are not problems of nature, they are problems of design. If science can take on God, it should not fear the market. Both are, after all, creations of man. W e must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable law s of economics. These so-called law s are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, w ith a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do w ith anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems. The scientific tradition exposed the unpopular astronomical fact that the earth w as not at the center of the universe. This stance challenged the social order, and its proponents w ere met w ith less than a w elcoming reception. Today, science has a similar opportunity: to expose the fallacies underlying our economic model instead of producing short-term strategies for mitigating the effects of inventions and discoveries that threaten this inherited market hallucination. The economic model has broken, for good. It's time to stop pretending it describes our w orld.

REALITY CLUB DISCUSSION

George Dyson Science Historian; Author, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe; Darwin Among the Machines

Rushkoff is right: our 21st-century global computing platform is still running a 13th-century banking system, and the resulting performance sucks. In any hydrodynamic system, the non-dimensional Reynolds Number characterizes the ratio between inertial forces (the result of mass and velocity) to viscous forces (the result of the inherent stickiness of the fluid). When the Reynolds number reaches a certain critical value, the system changes from laminar to turbulent flow. There is an equivalent to the Reynolds Number for an economic system: the ratio between the speed (and amplitude) at which currency is flowing through the system to the viscosity of the financial medium. The Reynolds number of our electronicallymediated economy has recently gone way up, with destabilizing results. The latest problem is that automated programs -the barnacles of the New Economy -are now trading *within* the frequency spectrum of the turbulent boundary layer. If this happens to a ship, it will slow down, and if it happens to an airplane, it will go into a stall. Wheres the anti-fouling paint?
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How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O'Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don't let them out until they have framed a new, massivelydistributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And dont call it a bank. Launch a new financial medium that is as open, scale-free, universally accessible, self-improving, and non-proprietary as the Internet, and leave the 13th century behind.

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