The Gaian Paradigm

THE GAIAN PARADIGM

1. Man is an ANIMAL; a product of Mother Nature; and his economic interactions are as "natural" and as subject to natural laws as the interactions in a forest food-chain. These "natural laws" are those governing COMPLEX SYSTEMS - non-linear; ill-understood at present; and only crudely simulated by the inadequate linear approximations of economics. This is why economics (and sociology, and psychology) is a "soft" science not amenable to exact, linear examination and prediction. The "invisible hand" is indeed invisible.

2. The many individuals constituting an ECONOSPHERE together make up the Gaian SUPER-ORGANISM, analagous to Hayek's "extended order"; a natural, organic SUPER-ENTITY, much as the collection of specialized, differentiated cells in the human body make up the SUPER-ORGANISM that is the individual human. Just as brain-cells, bone-cells, muscle-cells, blood-cells etc "co-operate" to deal with the environment (make a living) more efficiently than if they were seperate entities, so do the individual bakers, traders, craftsmen, doctors, scientists, clerks, bankers etc "co-operate" to make up a SUPER-ENTITY that provides them with a better living that could be had were they forced to be generalists on their own.

3. SPECIALIZATION and TRADE in the econosphere is organic, "natural" and subject to the (at present) unknown and unknowable laws of Mother Nature; the laws of COMPLEX SYSTEMS.

4. PRICES reflect huge amounts of information (on scarcity, transport costs etc. etc. etc.) and this information is invariably dispersed and unavailable to any single controlling entity. This is why attempts at control of prices does not and cannot work. ANY INTERFERENCE EG -STATE REGULATION/CONTROLWILL NOT AND CANNOT WORK! Attempts at ANY kind of control of economic activity is counterproductive.

Suppose a new science of Complexity could show that the human economy was actually an entirely natural organic phenomenon of Mother Nature - an inevitable SUPER-ORGANISM obedient to Complex laws ubiquitous throughout the universe.

"An economy interracts within itself like a giant brain, with as many neurons as there are people, as many interactions as there are things that they buy and services they sell. People who will never meet affect each other through a dense network of dispersed information processed interactively; every cause an effect, and every effect a cause. The entire entity is an organic, information- processing organism, vastly too convoluted for any puny human (or politburo thereof) to comprehend, let alone control. If one thinks of the economy as a plant, growth conditions are most favourable when the individual cells are given maximum freedom to develop, within the constraints of a rigid Rule of Law. The law provides the framework on which an economy grows; and freedom the fertilizer. To meddle with these growth conditions is directly to institute sub-optimal growth."

Grantland